Ironically, Jackson had emerged on the music scene just as the "black is beautiful" movement was becoming all the rage. In 1968, the Jackson brothers made a demo tape in which Michael, then 10, sported an Afro and danced like James Brown. He was a handsome little man, black and proud. He had soul, and he was super-bad.
And in a little more than 10 years, he would start looking like a white woman.
Margo Jefferson, the author of On Michael Jackson, called him a "postmodern shape-shifter." But the history of race and skin color in America suggests something more pathological.
Evidence abounds that self-loathing can have dire consequences. Young black men, for instance, have killed other black men just because they didn't like the looks on their faces - faces that, more often than not, resembled their own.
Jackson obviously did not like the black man he saw in the mirror.
Studies have shown that many African Americans obsess about facial features and skin color that conflict with images of beauty promoted in the mass media - images that are usually based on some notion of a white ideal.
Black people spend as much as five times more on personal-care products as do whites, according to some surveys, with skin-lighteners high on the list.
"The word was that Michael had vitiligo, which started on his hand and around his fingertips," said Cheryl Burgess, a dermatologist in Washington who is part of an elite circle of skin specialists that includes one of Jackson's dermatologists. "Eventually, though, he opted for a treatment that involved complete depigmentation. One day, I looked up, and Michael was almost white."
Although the condition affects only the skin, the definition of vitiligo seems to reflect Jackson's mental state as well: autoimmunity in which the body attempts to reject its pigment cells. It was as if Jackson had become vitiligo personified.
