An African perspective on Michael Jackson

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza takes over August 1 as the dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University. He's also the editor of The Zeleza Post and a blogger, which puts him in elite company among SoCal academics. He blogs there about Michael Jackson in a post titled The Death of a Black Man that argues "Jackson, the black man, died a long time ago." Excerpt:

When I read a text message this morning in Doha where I am currently visiting sent by my daughter in Atlanta that Michael Jackson had died I was aghast with shock. The soundtrack of a generation, including mine in far away Malawi where I grew up when Michael Jackson, the Motown child prodigy then teenage singing sensation who became a world mega superstar, has gone silent forever, although his music will of course live on.

The death of Michael Jackson yesterday marks the passing of a moment, the era when American icons both black and white bestrode a mesmerized world on the mighty wings of American cultural and corporate globalization. He sold more than 750 million albums worldwide, a feat that will be hard for any musician to surpass.

The man and the music scaled to heights of unimaginable stardom, but his unrivaled celebrity gradually spiraled into a freak show as the idolized King of Pop mutated into the ridiculed Whacko Jacko, a perennial fodder for the sensational tabloids. Born in a working class household in Gary, Indiana, he amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars which he eventually squandered through extravagant expenditures and poor investment decisions.

Born in what is now Zimbabwe and raised in Malawi, Zeleza comes to Westchester from the department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is the chair.