“Can You Feel It?”
How Michael Jackson Altered the Sensations of Racism, Part 1
Many of the worst moments in American history can be traced back to white fear of black men and other men of color. It shaped white interactions with American Indians, serving to justify genocide and the violation of treaty after treaty. It led to discrimination and violence against immigrants from China, Mexico, and other countries. And it was a motivating factor behind lynching, the horrific torture and murder of thousands of black men both before but especially after Emancipation.
This fear continues to shape white perceptions, actions, and reactions today. We see it in a long list of cases where white police officers cite fear as a justification for excessive, even deadly force against men of color. And in the rare event that one of these cases goes to trial, white jurors tend to sympathize with the officers’ fear and vote to acquit, providing a degree of institutional sanction for this type of police violence. We also see it in the numerous instances of #LivingWhileBlack, where white Americans call police to report black Americans — particularly black men, but also black women and children — engaged in everyday activities like mowing the lawn, moving into an apartment, or simply sitting in a coffee shop.
Often, this fear seems to have no reasonable basis. So where does this irrational fear come from, and why is it so pervasive? Even more importantly, how do we stop it?
These questions lie at the heart of one of the most vexing challenges Americans face when trying to eradicate racism: most racial bias in the U.S. functions at a subconscious level. The vast majority of white Americans do not identify as white supremacists. Quite the contrary. Most find this ideology abhorrent and support the principle of racial equality, at least intellectually. However, racism endures because it is woven into the psychological fabric of white America — specifically, into the visceral reactions to racial signifiers that white Americans have been culturally conditioned to feel. These reactions are spontaneous, occurring before the conscious mind has a chance to weigh in, and often they’re so subtle they aren’t even recognized. However, they have a powerful influence on the behavior and beliefs of many white Americans by shaping in some nebulous, unspoken way what feels right and comfortable and what doesn’t: what feels scary or threatening or disturbing or just vaguely wrong somehow.
In other words, most racial bias in the U.S. today isn’t the result of ideology but of sensations, and these involuntary reactions are extremely difficult to overcome. They’re largely impervious to logic or our best intentions. Suppressing them doesn’t make them go away. And because the sensations of racism are experienced physically, they seem innately real and true in a way that ideas don’t. While we can debate a political issue, how do we debate a feeling? It just seems instinctive and natural — as natural as the body itself. That’s one reason these sensations have been so effective at maintaining the power structures of racism for so long.
However, there is a way to alter the sensations of racism: through art. Art has the power to transform our feelings in a way that other forms of political discourse — speeches, debates, editorials, even protests — simply can’t. The protests that have erupted since the death of George Floyd are vitally important at pushing for change in our institutions of power, but they don’t get to the essence of racism, which lies in the hearts and minds of individual Americans. But art can go where politics can’t. It can engage with the subconscious mind and alter those biased feelings.
In fact, I believe a radically experimental American artist has charted a path forward, creating an entirely new genre of art specifically designed to target and neutralize the physical sensations of racism. And I believe his art has already brought about profound change at both the individual and cultural level in a way that only art can. Perhaps surprisingly, I’m speaking of Michael Jackson, an artist who is often dismissed as simply a pop star — or rejected with disgust as a freak and a criminal.
While Jackson did make significant contributions to popular music and dance, he was far more than just a performer. As both an artist and a unique cultural icon, he powerfully challenged the way millions of people think about racial differences. Even more importantly, he helped alter the way white America feels about race — in effect, rewiring the “gut reactions” of white Americans and opening up new possibilities for counteracting racism at its deepest, most entrenched levels.
From a young age, Jackson believed in the power of art to counter prejudice by modifying the feelings and attitudes of his global audience. For example, he conceived, wrote, and produced The Triumph in his early 20s (in fact, it was his first film as a producer) and it’s an explicit appeal for racial harmony:
All the colors of the world should be
Loving each other wholeheartedly …
Spread the word and try to teach the man
Who’s hating his brother that hate won’t do
Yes, we’re all the same
Yes, the blood inside of me is inside of you
Now tell me
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it?
Can you see what’s going down?
Can you feel it in your bones?
Can you feel it?
The film is structured as an allegory, beginning with flood imagery that suggests a symbolic cleansing of the world’s sins, and it presents artists as mythic figures born of fire who tower over cities like Titans, spreading enlightenment through their art. Importantly, The Triumph focuses specifically on art’s ability to influence the physical sensations an audience experiences. For example, the lyrics speak to the audience directly and repeatedly ask, “Can you feel it?” So through a combination of vocals and visuals, The Triumph emphasizes the power of art to bring about profound psychological changes, affecting not only how an audience thinks about racial differences but how they feel.
Jackson continued to fight racism and other forms of prejudice throughout his long career, and these efforts only intensified after he was accused of child sexual abuse. In fact, his later work is among his most powerful and important. However, much of this work is so revolutionary that we don’t yet even recognize it as art. Developing an appreciation for his work and the full measure of his artistic achievement has implications not only for how we interpret Jackson and his legacy but also for how we see art and its potential for social change. However, to fully grasp Jackson’s ideas and the transformative power of his art, we must first gain a better understanding of the cultural undercurrents he was fighting against.
The Power of Fear
An ironic feature of racism in the U.S. is that white Americans tend to feel vulnerable and lash out in fear even when they are the ones wielding power and putting other lives at risk. In fact, it often seems that the greater the power imbalance, the greater the fear.
For example, white settlers and the fledgling U.S. government engaged in acts of brutality and oppression that devastated American Indians: stealing land, killing bison and destroying food supplies, removing children from their families, and in some cases intentionally spreading disease. Indian populations plummeted as white settlers colonized North America, from somewhere between 2 to 18 million people before the first settlements to only 250,000 by the 1890s. But this oppression only seems to have increased white fears. As Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in 1891,
Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth.
So an awareness of past injustices did not lead Baum to a moral reckoning. Instead, he called for “one more wrong,” the total annihilation of American Indians —a horrific impulse born of white fear of “untamed and untameable” people of color.
This odd reversal of power relationships — of misreading who exactly should be frightened of whom — was a key feature of the 1992 trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of assaulting Rodney King. In one of the first instances of police brutality captured on film, an amateur video shows a group of 15 white officers surrounding King as he is savagely beaten. However, during the trial the officers said they were “scared” and “frightened” of King.
The ranking officer at the scene, Sgt. Stacey Koon, described King as “buffed out” and “very muscular,” which he interpreted to mean “that he was probably an ex-con,” and he implied that King was unusually powerful, claiming that two officers who tried to handcuff him were “thrown off.” Koon went on to describe King as almost bestial in his strength, endurance, and tolerance of pain. For example, he said he tased King and he “gave out a bear-like yell” but “continued to rise.” So he tased him again, and this time he said King groaned “like a wounded animal and … I could see the vibrations on him but he seemed to be overcoming it.” Once again King “continued to rise,” according to Koon, and this is when the beating began.
Koon interpreted King’s endurance as an indicator that he was on PCP, which he suggested was a “nightmare” drug that could give criminals exceptional strength: “It’s kinda like a policeman’s nightmare that the individual that’s under this is super strong, they have more or less a one-track mind, they exhibit super strength.” Koon went on to say that when dealing with someone on PCP, as he thought King was, police “equate it with a monster.” Through testimony such as this, the defense was able to portray King as scary and dangerous, almost nonhuman — in Koon’s words, “bear-like,” a “wounded animal,” “a monster” — even though King was unarmed, outnumbered, and not on PCP.
The white jury agreed that under these circumstances the officers could reasonably believe they were in danger, even though King was surrounded by 15 men armed with guns and clubs, and in much of the video he is writhing on the ground in pain while they beat and kick him. The jury therefore decided that the officers’ use of force was justified. In other words, the white officers charged in the case were acquitted because their fear of King vindicated them in the eyes of the white jurors.
The King trial demonstrates how black men and other men of color can be characterized as a threat to whites even at the very moment they are the target of white aggression. We see this ironic reversal in two recent videos as well: the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, and the confrontation in Central Park between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper. In both videos we see a white person either inflicting or threatening harm to a black man. However, in both cases the white aggressors appear to mentally invert the power dynamic and instead see themselves as the ones at risk.
George Floyd was a “gentle giant,” according to those who knew him: a 6’4” black man with a muscular build, a soft voice, and a gentle manner. He was accused of a fairly innocuous crime: passing a counterfeit $20 bill he may not have realized was fake. However, in a video of his arrest, a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, treats him like a violent criminal and an imminent threat. The video starts with Floyd face-down on the pavement, his hands handcuffed behind him, and Chauvin kneeling on his neck. Floyd repeatedly tells the officers he can’t breathe, but they ignore him. After several minutes he stops talking and then stops moving. Black passersby realize he is in distress and try to alert Chauvin and the other officers to his condition, telling them, “Look at him,” “Check his pulse,” “He’s not breathing right now,” and “He’s not moving. Get off of his neck.” It’s striking how different their perceptions are from those of the officers. They repeatedly encourage the officers to really look at Floyd and see that he is in a medical crisis, but the officers appear unable or unwilling to see Floyd as a vulnerable human being.
Instead, Chauvin responds to the bystanders’ increasingly urgent entreaties by pulling a can of mace from his pocket and pointing it at them. One witness interprets this as a sign of fear: “The first thing you want to grab is your mace because you’re scared. Scared of fucking minorities.” But as in the Rodney King video, this fear seems unwarranted. All of the power in this situation is on Chauvin’s side. He is armed and accompanied by three other armed officers, while Floyd is face-down on the ground, handcuffed and unresponsive. Clearly Floyd is not a threat, and neither are the concerned bystanders who simply want Chauvin to ease off and let him breathe. However, Chauvin continues to kneel on Floyd’s neck for an additional four minutes after his shoulders slump and he appears to lose consciousness. At some point, Floyd quietly dies there on the pavement. Watching this video is harrowing, like witnessing a senseless execution conducted in slow motion before your eyes.
The Cooper video was shot the same day, just a few hours before Floyd died. Amy Cooper, a white dog owner, flew into a rage when Chris Cooper, a black birdwatcher, asked her to comply with park rules and leash her dog. In the video, she advances on him angrily as he backs away and tells her, “Please don’t come close to me.” She then threatens to call the police, saying, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” which is a fabrication. He has done nothing of the kind. In fact, she is the one threatening him, brandishing the police like a weapon — and as the Floyd video painfully demonstrates, the police can be a lethal weapon when deployed against black men. Throughout these initial interactions, Amy Cooper appears angry and confrontational. However, her voice and demeanor shift dramatically when talking with the dispatcher. Her emotional presentation becomes that of a frightened victim, while her voice becomes frantic and breathless and seemingly trembles in fear as she urges the dispatcher to “send the cops immediately.” You can witness the abrupt shift in the video, though Christian Cooper has done nothing to account for the change.
In all three of these videos, we see white people wildly inflating the threat posed by a black man — an exaggeration seemingly driven by fear — and reacting with extreme aggression. The Los Angeles police beat Rodney King senseless, causing permanent brain damage. Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck until he died. And Amy Cooper’s false accusation was a potentially lethal threat to Christian Cooper. Historically, black men have been tortured and killed because of false accusations like hers, as in the notorious case of Emmett Till.
However, in each of these videos it’s hard to pinpoint the exact source of their fear. This is not situational fear — a spike of emotion and adrenaline evoked by our immediate surroundings and circumstances, as we normally think of fear. Instead, this is fear of a different kind: a deep-seated “gut reaction” that white men and women have been culturally conditioned to experience. Maya Santamaria, the owner of a Minneapolis nightclub where Chauvin and Floyd both worked, hinted at this in a CBS report when describing Chauvin’s interactions with her black customers: “I think he was afraid and intimidated” by black people, she said.
A complicating factor in all of this is that most white people in the U.S. know that racism is wrong and therefore see any admission of racially biased feelings or attitudes as shameful. This leads whites to deny these impulses exist, even to themselves. For example, Amy Cooper seems genuinely embarrassed by her actions and she apologized in a public statement the next day (though she apologized after she had been fired from her job because of the incident). In an interview with CNN, she emphasized that “I am not a racist,” and she no doubt believes that. Intellectually, she may champion racial equality as an abstract ideal, and so may the Los Angeles and Minneapolis police officers involved in the King and Floyd cases. However, when interacting with an actual flesh-and-blood black man, they all failed to recognize the humanity of the person in front of them. Instead, they felt a rush of uncomfortable feelings and obscure impulses, and they lashed out in ways that had been scripted for them generations ago.
The Sensations of Racism
This disparity between our ideals and our impulses was perhaps the central conflict of my childhood. I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1960s, at a time when the Civil Rights movement dominated the local and national news. When I was in elementary school, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District became the first in the nation to integrate its schools through mandatory bussing, and suddenly the demographics of my school shifted dramatically. In second grade, my teacher and all of my classmates were white. In third grade, my teacher and many of my classmates were black, and my understanding of the world expanded a bit. The idealistic teachers at my school — both black and white — worked hard to make integration a success, and so did my parents. While many parents in my all-white neighborhood complained bitterly about bussing and threatened to move their kids to private schools, my parents told me that integration was important and I should be proud to be part of it.
They also taught me to admire the black men and women I saw in the news who were fighting for the right to vote or attend better schools or simply sit at a lunch counter. While my parents tried to shield me from the worst images, I occasionally saw photos or news footage of protesters being beaten with clubs or attacked by police dogs, and I can still remember the shock of that. I would look at the protester’s frightened but determined faces and flinch in fear for their safety, and through their suffering I felt the stirrings of empathy for people I didn’t know, whose life experiences were very different from my own. As I learned more about the South’s long history of racial oppression, my admiration became mixed with a sense of horror and shame for the injustices the protesters were fighting against. When my Sunday School teachers talked about original sin, I literally thought they meant slavery.
In this way, I was taught to question the past and believe in the equality of all people, black and white. But alongside these high ideals ran an undercurrent of counter-narratives, the repeated whisperings of stories much older than those my teachers told me. These whispered stories insisted that black bodies and white bodies were essentially different: that black skin wasn’t just darker than white skin but thicker, more resistant to injury, and less sensitive to pain than white skin, so that black bodies didn’t feel the impact of a billy club or the blast of a fire hose or the bite of a police dog in the same way a white body would. These stories also insinuated that the sweat and odors of white bodies were fundamentally different than those of black bodies, and they implied that proper white bodies didn’t sweat or smell at all. This deep divide between the inspiring stories we heard on the news and the enduring stories we heard whispered in the background created an internal split for many Southern white children. The public stories influenced our ideas about the lofty goal of racial equality, but the whispered stories shaped our feelings about black bodies and black people.
This divide existed from the founding of the United States. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson boldly declared that “all men are created equal.” But in Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote that blacks “seem to require less sleep” than whites, are “more tolerant of heat,” and have “a very strong and disagreeable odour.” Jefferson speculated about psychological differences as well, writing that blacks apparently suffer from “a want of fore-thought” and feel a lusty “eager desire” for “their female” rather than love. He also wrote that “their griefs are transient” — a convenient belief for a slave owner.
While the white adults I knew in the 1960s tended to be more circumspect in stating their opinions about racial differences than Jefferson was, the racist notions that he documented more than two centuries ago persisted. Underlying this entire belief system was an insistence that blacks and whites were essentially different, and this had an impact on how white children perceived black people — even those they knew well. For example, when I was in college a white friend told me she had been raised in part by a black housekeeper and loved her. She was an important part of her childhood. But one day the housekeeper cut her hand, and my friend was astonished to see that her blood was red. She had assumed her blood was as dark as her skin. My friend was a young girl when this happened, but years later she could still remember the emotional jolt she felt at that moment. The stories she’d heard throughout childhood had convinced her that racial differences weren’t just superficial but fundamental: that they extended to the blood in our veins and the very essence of who we are.
Later, as white girls of my generation left childhood and became teenagers, we were introduced to another, very specific type of narrative: stories of abduction and rape and murder. This was before the concept of date rape, back when the word “rapist” meant a stranger lurking in the dark. And in the American South, especially, that stranger was invariably black. In news reports as well as the whispered stories of older white women, the message was always the same: white women needed to protect themselves from the sexual threat posed by black men.
Looking back, I see all of these stories as playing a decisive role in perpetuating racism, influencing not only how young white people thought about race but, even more importantly, how we felt about race. George Orwell describes a similar phenomenon in terms of class prejudice in 1930s England. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell writes that while doing research on conditions among the working class, he was forced to confront the issue of class prejudice — his own internalized class prejudice:
Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West — the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.
That was what we were taught — the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical revulsion cannot.… [E]ven “lower-class” people whom you knew to be quite clean — servants, for instance — were faintly unappetising. The smell of their sweat, the very texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours. (emphasis his)
Orwell’s frank talk of a culturally produced “physical revulsion” may make us uncomfortable, but he’s broaching a crucial element of racism and classism that must be addressed if we are ever to eradicate prejudice — namely, the powerful influence of affect. The biases Orwell identifies are not based on reason but instead arise from visceral reactions that have been carefully cultivated for centuries. One way these feelings and physical sensations have been perpetuated across generations is through the kinds of whispered stories that populated my childhood and teenage years. The roots of these stories stretch back centuries, to the earliest days of American history.
Empire of Innocence
In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Limerick persuasively argues that the U.S. was built on a narrative of innocence — namely, the innocence of white settlers engaged in what they saw as a benevolent attempt to civilize the New World. Even when they knowingly violated treaties and pushed American Indians from land they had inhabited for millennia, white settlers tended to see themselves as victims rather than invaders, more sinned against than sinning. Limerick views this trope of innocence as such a persistent narrative in the forging of America’s national character that she gives the U.S. the sobriquet “Empire of Innocence.” As she writes, “The idea of the innocent victim retains extraordinary power, and no situation made a stronger symbolic statement of this than that of the white woman murdered by Indians.” Over time, this narrative of a perceived threat against white women, and often white children, by non-white men took on a sexual character.
For example, in the 1860s the Central Pacific Railroad Company recruited thousands of Chinese men to come to the U.S. to work on the first transcontinental railroad. Other Chinese laborers were recruited to work in the mining industry. However, by the 1870s white Californians began to feel intense anxiety over the size and economic success of the Chinese immigrant community, which by the end of the decade comprised nearly ten percent of California’s population. White legislators responded with America’s first drug law, which criminalized opium and explicitly targeted Chinese men. The justification for this law was protecting the sexual innocence of white women, as federal judge Frederic Block succinctly described: “It was believed that Chinese men were luring white women to have sex in opium dens.” These fears led to attacks on Chinese individuals and communities, confiscation of property, and an abrupt end to immigration from China.
A parallel movement occurred in the 1930s, but this time the target was Mexican immigrants. As with Chinese workers, Mexican laborers had been actively encouraged to enter the U.S. to meet a labor shortage. However, when the Great Depression led white workers to feel increased job anxiety, those Mexicans laborers were no longer welcome and marijuana laws were enacted against them. As Sean Hogan explains in “Race, Ethnicity, and Early U.S. Drug Policy,” newspapers stoked intense anti-marijuana sentiment over the image of “drug-crazed Mexicans ravaging women and children in the southwestern United States,” despite a 1930 review of crime records that showed below-average rates of crime and delinquency among Mexican immigrants. So again, economic and cultural anxieties led white men to prosecute and persecute non-white men, with the justification that they were protecting the sexual innocence of white women and children.
However, nothing galvanized the white imagination quite like the image of a white woman outraged by a black man. As journalist Ida Wells described in an 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, falsely accusing black men of raping white women was used as a psychological tool to enflame white mobs and justify their actions as they attacked, tortured, and murdered black men. As Wells wrote,
[N]ot less than one hundred and fifty have been known to have met violent death at the hands of cruel bloodthirsty mobs during the past nine months.
To palliate this record … and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country, the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women.
Wells suggests these vicious lynchings weren’t simply isolated acts of brutality but instead had an over-arching political purpose: to suppress freed black people, especially black men, following the abolition of slavery. As she writes, “the whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race.”
The charge of rape proved an effective justification for white-on-black violence, according to Wells, because “the crime of rape is so revolting” to both blacks and whites that “Even … Afro-Americans … have too often taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.” Wells warned her readers that this rationalization had become so prevalent by the end of the 1800s that “it is in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists” — a prediction that proved prescient. The evidence suggests that black men did in fact come to be perceived as sexual predators, and the focus of irrational fears by white men and women because of that misrepresentation.
These fears extended throughout Restoration and up to the present day. For example, the U.S. experienced waves of anti-cocaine hysteria beginning in the late 1800s and enacted a series of repressive laws against cocaine in the early 1900s — a pattern that repeated itself in the 1980s against crack cocaine. These laws and the social debate surrounding them targeted black men in much the same way that opium and marijuana legislation targeted Chinese and Mexican immigrants. However, the “campaign” against black men was “even more vicious,” according to Hogan: “The imagery and rhetoric of the cocaine-crazed southern black man … spuriously validated an increase in violence against blacks in the South.” As with the crusades against opium and marijuana, the image of non-white cocaine addicts sexually abusing white women and children was used to fulfill a political purpose, as Hogan explains:
The … hysteria related to cocaine and African Americans was … an invention of white society, a myth created in an environment of fear and prejudice … with the intent of maintaining a dominant and oppressive status quo. Depicting African Americans as cocaine-crazed sexual deviants, and a threat to the purity of white women and children, served this end.
So once again, the “myth” of non-white sexual predators attacking white women and children was used to repress a vulnerable minority population — in this case, black men attempting to emancipate themselves from centuries of racial oppression.
But why exactly has the narrative of non-white men as beasts and rapists preying upon white women and children survived for so long, and been repeated so many times? Part of the answer may simply be property rights, a driving force behind much of American history. As Limerick writes, “If Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its movies would be about real estate.” The 2006 documentary Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks out of Town in America makes this connection clear. It begins with chilling charcoal sketches of lynched black bodies hanging from trees and other scenes of white-on-black mob violence, interspersing them with stark lines of explanatory text:
From the 1860s to the 1920s, in more than a dozen counties, white Americans violently expelled their black neighbors.
The pattern was eerily similar: an alleged assault of a white woman, the lynching of a black man, and the forced expulsion of an entire black community.
The property the African Americans had to leave behind — homes, livestock and acres of land — was lost forever.
The film then looks at three cases of banishment — in Georgia, Missouri, and Arkansas — where a black man was accused of raping a white woman, and that charge was used by whites as justification to terrorize and destroy a thriving black community. Local whites then confiscated the property that had belonged to black residents.
Perhaps the most egregious example of whites using a dubious claim of sexual assault as a pretext for destroying a successful black community is the Tulsa massacre of 1921. A shy black teenager, Dick Rowland, apparently stumbled while entering a downtown Tulsa elevator and fell toward the young white elevator operator, Sarah Page. She reacted with fear and surprise, and he was arrested and accused of accosting her. Page herself refused to press charges, and several prominent white citizens came forward on his behalf. However, rumors spread and an inflammatory article in The Tulsa Tribune accused Rowland of either raping or attempting to rape Page in the elevator.
A mob of about 2,000 whites gathered at the courthouse and violence erupted. According to a New York Times article, the Tulsa riot “may be the deadliest occurrence of racial violence in United States history,” with “up to 300 people … killed and more than 8,000 left homeless.” A 40-block area of black homes and businesses known as the Greenwood district was completely destroyed by looting and fire. Before the riot, the Greenwood district was one of the most affluent black communities in the U.S. — an area so prosperous Booker T. Washington christened it Negro Wall Street. As historian Scott Ellsworth notes in the documentary The Night Tulsa Burned, this created a kind of racial envy that led to white-on-black violence in Tulsa and other successful black communities:
The important thing to remember about race riots during this period is that they are characterized by whites invading black communities … attacking black businesses, attacking black homes.
Ellsworth goes on to explain that “For some white people, a black person with any wealth, then as well as today, is something that created jealousy.” In Tulsa as well as many other communities destroyed by angry white mobs, a false allegation of sexual assault was the pretext used for murder and the destruction or theft of black wealth.
The implications extend well beyond the loss of property, as Derek Litvak explained in a Washington Post article about the importance of land ownership in both the U.S. and South Africa:
[L]and has long been a primary source of independence, especially for black people. After the Civil War, land ownership was essential to fundamental, and possibly lasting, change — which is precisely why it was repeatedly denied to freed people, who understood land ownership as key to emancipation.
Using lynch law as a violent means to seize black property robbed black citizens of their liberty as well as their land — a loss of economic independence that could take generations to restore.
However, the image of the black rapist has historically been used in more subtle ways as well: not only to destroy successful black businesses and communities and confiscate black property, but also to unite white men and women against non-white men and reinforce white male authority. For example, The Birth of a Nation (1915) is frequently cited as one of the most influential films in U.S. history, as cultural critic Joe Vogel describes:
It ushered in a new art form — the motion picture — that transformed the entertainment industry. … Birth became the most profitable film of its time — and possibly of all time, adjusted for inflation. It was the first film to cost over $100 thousand dollars to make, the first to have a musical score, the first to be shown at the White House, the first to be viewed by the Supreme Court and members of congress, and the first to be viewed by millions of ordinary Americans. It was America’s original blockbuster.
According to Ralph Ellison, it also “forged the twin screen image of the Negro as bestial rapist and grinning, eye-rolling clown.”
The film is set during and immediately after the Civil War, and the climax centers on the twin narratives of a black officer attempting to rape a young white woman named Flora (she commits suicide rather than succumb to him) and a scheming black politician — ironically named Silas Lynch — attempting to coerce another young white woman named Elsie into marrying him (she is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan). The conflict is resolved when the Klan rides in on horseback to the sounds of triumphal orchestral music to restore order — meaning white supremacy — in part by killing the black officer who accosted Flora and dumping his body on Lynch’s doorstep.
The film ends with a double wedding: a white brother and sister from the South marry a white brother and sister from the North. Significantly, the Southern bride is Elsie. The message is clear. What will reunite whites from the North with whites from the South and restore a nation divided by civil war is their shared fear of black rapists — or more symbolically, their shared fear of black men usurping positions traditionally held by white men.
The narrative of the black rapist therefore takes on significant political implications in The Birth of a Nation, and those implications still carry significant weight today, as the election of Donald Trump makes clear. From the earliest days of his campaign Trump explicitly targeted men of color as sexual predators. For example, in his June 16, 2015, speech announcing his candidacy, Trump notoriously claimed that Mexican men are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And he has returned to this playbook again and again. Repeatedly during his campaign and continuing through his presidency, Trump has characterized men of color — not only Mexican but also black, Muslim, and American Indian men — as predatory criminals.
However, Trump is by no means the first politician to stoke these kinds of racist fears. Candidates throughout U.S. history have found that evoking subliminal fears of non-white men as brutes and rapists can be a very effective political tool, especially in times of heightened cultural and economic anxiety. For example, the early 1980s was a period of overlapping crises, with double-digit inflation, high unemployment, violence in the inner cities, an energy crisis, a savings-and-loan crisis, and a “crisis of confidence,” as President Carter termed it. And significantly, two of the biggest stories of the decade — Willie Horton and the Central Park Five — centered on men of color accused of raping white women. Even more significantly, candidate George H.W. Bush and aspiring candidate Trump then leveraged these two cases for political capital.
Importantly, the Willie Horton case was relatively unknown until Bush’s staff publicized and politicized his crimes during the 1988 elections, making Horton a household name and a central feature of Bush’s campaign against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. As Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, famously predicted, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” Horton was a convicted murderer serving time in a Massachusetts prison when he was allowed to participate in a weekend furlough program begun by a Republican governor and continued under subsequent governors, including Dukakis. As columnist Roger Simon wrote in a Baltimore Sun article, Horton was out on furlough when he “broke into a home and tied a man to a joist in the basement, slashed his chest and stomach with a knife, then beat and raped his fiancée while she screamed and screamed and screamed.” Bush invited the male victim to join him on the campaign trail where he told his story to potential voters, describing how it felt to hear his fiancée’s screams as she was repeatedly raped by Horton.
Bush also benefited from television ads featuring threatening images of Horton that emphasized his massive frame, dark skin, and large afro. As Simon wrote of Horton,
He was big. He was black. He was every guy you ever crossed the street to avoid, every pair of smoldering eyes you ever looked away from on the bus or subway. He was every person you moved out of the city to escape, every sound in the night that made you get up and check the locks on the windows and grab the door handles and give them an extra tug.…
Willie Horton was a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a kidnapper, a brute.
In other words, he was perfect.
Horton “was perfect,” according to Simon, because he allowed the Bush campaign to tap into white fears of black men in a deeply emotional, seemingly primal way.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Policy Center, has long questioned the politicization of this story. She contacted Bush’s staff about their source for the Horton story, and they cited an article in The Lawrence [Massachusetts] Eagle-Tribune. However, as Jamieson pointed out in a 2016 documentary,
That source had other instances of people jumping furlough who were white, and they committed more horrific crimes than Horton did. Why select the African American? And why select that particular narrative, in which there is a rape as part of the story?
These are essential questions. Susan Estrich, Dukakis’ campaign manager, offers a compelling answer: “There is no more powerful symbol of racial hatred, still, than the black man who rapes the white woman.” American history suggests Estrich is right, and that the image of the black rapist is such a “powerful symbol” because it stirs the antipathies of white voters in a deep, visceral way.
Atwater himself openly acknowledged this, saying, “The Horton case is one of those gut issues … particularly in the South.” Based on the evidence, it’s hard to dispute the conclusion that Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign shrewdly benefited from the “gut” reactions of white voters — specifically, their fear of black men as sexual predators. Significantly, the Willie Horton story helped Bush go from a 17-point deficit in the polls to a decisive win, carrying 40 of the 50 states, including all of the South. As Simon notes, “Everybody knew how the Bubba (white Southern) vote would react to a black man raping a white woman.” Considering the electoral map for 1988, it appears this cynical political calculation was correct, and not just in the South.
One person who seems to have learned important lessons from how the Bush campaign politicized the Willie Horton case is Donald Trump. The following year, Trump began floating the idea they he might be interested in a presidential run himself. And in a move that mimicked Bush’s strategy, Trump seized on the case of the Central Park Jogger, enflaming public opinion against five 14- to 16-year-old boys accused of brutally beating and raping a white woman running through Central Park. Four of the accused teenagers were black and one was Latino. Trump ran a full-page ad in all four of New York City’s major newspapers calling for the death penalty, and he appeared on talk shows — including an inflammatory visit to Larry King Live — where he explicitly tried to stir up public animosity and even hatred. As Trump told King, “I hate these people. Let’s all hate these people, because maybe hate is what we need to get something done.”
One of the Central Park defendants, Yusef Salaam, later described Trump as “the fire starter” in stoking public anger against the teens, saying, “he lit the match.” Salaam also explicitly linked Trump’s actions to America’s long, shameful history of white mobs lynching black men accused of raping — or even looking at — white women. As Salaam said, “It was the scariest, scariest time in my life…. Had this been in the 1950s, I would have had the same fate as Emmett Till.… I would have been hung.” In 2002, the convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated after another man confessed to the crime and DNA evidence exonerated them. However, Trump discounted the evidence and continued to question their innocence during his 2016 presidential campaign. He also repeatedly stirred public opinion against non-white immigrants, accusing them of rape, murder, and other violent crimes.
So while Bush and Trump are very different politicians in terms of their temperament, intelligence, experience, and principles, historical evidence suggests that they both owe their presidency to the same poisonous well: their willingness to enflame white fears of non-white men as sexual predators. However, looking back through American history, the problem is not so much Bush or Trump. Rather, it is the racist fears that propelled them to victory — fears that have served a subtle but potent political purpose for generations, especially since the abolition of slavery.
But why are these racial anxieties so effective? The threat posed by black men (or Latino or Asian or Muslim men, or any targeted group) was not a pressing national crisis in 1988 or 2016, and it never has been. So why has this hysterical narrative of non-white sexual predators had such an out-sized political and cultural influence, and for so many generations? I believe the answer lies in affect, the complex web of responses — both psychological and physiological — that together form what we tend to think of as our “gut reactions.” Specifically, these stories stoke fears so powerful they cause a visceral reaction, and in that way help create and perpetuate white America’s “gut” response to racial signifiers.
Consider the rather hackneyed scenario of a white woman walking alone down a city street and seeing a black man walk toward her. Because of the pervasive narrative of the non-white sexual predator, she might look at him and think about a specific scary story (for example, about Willie Horton or the Central Park Five or hundreds more stories like them) and feel a sense of uncertainty or fear. Even more insidiously, she might not consciously think about any particular story at all, but still look at that approaching figure and experience a quickened pulse, an involuntary intake of breath, and a vague feeling of apprehension without knowing why. That’s affect — when stimuli cause immediate psychological and physiological reactions before the conscious brain has time to process what is happening or why.
These sensations are extremely difficult to overcome. For example, on March 18, 2008, in perhaps his most important speech on race, presidential candidate Barack Obama described his white grandmother as “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world.” However, he went on to say that she “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Even her deep love for her grandson, who lived with her for much of his childhood, could not eradicate this fear.
This kind of “gut reaction” is racism at its most raw and most intractable because you can’t reason with it. How do you debate a physical sensation? It feels true at a deep, physical level. Even if this hypothetical white woman is sufficiently self-aware to question her own reactions and try to suppress or alter them, it’s almost impossible for her to do so because they are spontaneous — both pre-cognitive and pre-verbal — and therefore happen before her conscious mind has a chance to mediate her responses.
These psycho-physiological reactions are man-made: a learned reflex. They result from the thousands of stories and comments and images a person experiences over a lifetime, especially in childhood. But because these reactions happen so quickly and because they involve physical sensations, they don’t seem to be man-made. Instead, they feel instinctual or natural — as natural as the body itself — and therefore they seem to exist outside language, outside culture, outside the reach of reason and logic. The perception that these spontaneous physical responses are real and natural is precisely what makes them so resistant to change, and so very difficult to fight.
Seen in this light, the persistent narrative of the black or brown sexual predator plays an insidious cultural function: it helps create the “gut reaction” many white Americans feel toward men of color. This narrative is so pervasive — and has been, for so many generations — that it subconsciously shapes how many white Americans perceive and emotionally respond to black men and other men of color. It helps explain why many white Americans tend to see men of color as scary and guilty of some vague crime even when they’ve done nothing wrong — for example, why a white woman managing a Starbucks would call police to report two black men sitting in her coffee shop or numerous other instances of #LivingWhileBlack. It may also help explain why white police officers too often display an inexplicable rage towards men of color accused of relatively minor crimes, and why they repeatedly use excessive force against black men especially.
An Unexpected Teen Idol
This narrative of the black or brown sexual predator played out in complicated ways in the life and career of Michael Jackson. He first gained national recognition in early 1970 as the lead singer for the Jackson 5. It was a time when the Civil Rights movement was at a difficult juncture, facing an abrupt loss of leadership following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as a growing white backlash. The Civil Rights movement had awakened the conscience of many white Americans to racial inequalities in the U.S., but many whites — even some who considered themselves progressive — were nevertheless outraged by the thought of affirmative action, desegregation, school bussing, the rise of black power and black nationalism, or seemingly any substantive change to the status quo.
It was at this particularly tense moment that Michael Jackson burst onto the scene as an effervescent child star everyone could love. Both black and white audiences delighted in his singing and dancing, but from the beginning he and his brothers represented something more than just entertainment. In general, black audiences were proud of the Jacksons and held them up as a preeminent example of a prosperous black family, and they pointed to their success as a model of black enterprise and empowerment. Meanwhile, white audiences were proud of the Jacksons too, but for a different reason: they pointed to it as proof that the U.S. was becoming a more open society and moving beyond the racism of the past. As a 12-year-old boy with a sweet face and a disarming shyness in interviews, Jackson proved nonthreatening to white audiences — and Motown president Berry Gordy shaved two years off his age to make him even less threatening. So white America was happy to celebrate Michael Jackson. They were both charmed by this tremendously talented little black boy, and rather proud of themselves for being charmed.
However, little boys mature into adult men, and this placed Jackson in an extremely complicated cultural position. Growing up is difficult for any child star, as evidenced by the long list of child actors whose careers ended when they hit adolescence. It’s exponentially more difficult when you are a black child growing up in a racist country with a deep fear of black men. But against all odds, Jackson threaded the needle and became something entirely new in American history. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he emerged as America’s first — and so far our only — black teen idol. He became an object of desire for fans around the globe, including millions of young white Americans. They hung his posters in their bedrooms and fainted at his concerts alongside their black counterparts, something that had been simply unthinkable before Michael Jackson came along.
Jackson was able to accomplish this unprecedented feat in part because of his popularity as a child star. White America felt a deep affection and familiarity with him from seeing him on stage from such a young age, and this helped soften their fears of a grown Michael Jackson. But this accounts for only part of his success. Jackson also worked to maintain a persona that was as nonthreatening as possible to white America — a lesson Gordy had schooled him in very thoroughly. Jackson tended to be guarded in interviews, steering clear of politics as Gordy had taught him, and he emphasized the childlike parts of his personality well into adulthood, even adopting a soft voice that was somewhat higher than his natural speaking voice. He also appeared rather shy and deferential in interviews with white critics especially, though he could be livelier with black journalists, as in his 2007 interview with Ebony magazine.
Jackson therefore maintained a carefully calibrated balancing act in how he presented himself to white America, pushing the boundaries in some areas while assuaging white fears in others. This is clearly evident in how he performed his sexuality — and his public displays of sexuality were to some extent a performance, as he explained to biographer Randy Taraborrelli in a 1977 interview:
I think it’s fun that girls think I’m sexy… But I don’t think that about myself. It’s all just fantasy, really. I like to make my fans happy so I might pose or dance in a way that makes them think I’m romantic. But really I guess I’m not that way.
Through his concerts and films as well as his public persona, Jackson presented a radically new vision of black male sexuality: steamy, sensual, and very desirable to young women of all races (as millions of fans around the world can attest) but also sweet, sensitive, innocent, even naive. White America had never seen anything like this before, and it took the nation — and the world — by storm. He became by many accounts the most famous man in the world and an acknowledged sex symbol by teens of all races.
We tend to trivialize teen idols, so it may be difficult to grasp the full significance of what Jackson accomplished. By establishing his own body — a black man’s body — as an object of desire, he set off subterranean tremors in the white psyche. His body inspired sensations that had rarely been confessed by whites before: namely, that they found a black body sexy and desirable. In this way, Jackson altered or at least complicated the subliminal responses of white audiences to black bodies and black people, especially black men. This is historic: a pivot point in American history. He upended established conventions and challenged existing power structures on many different fronts — for example, through his immense fame, wealth, and professional success — but the psychological changes he brought about in the hearts and minds of white Americans were perhaps the most profound and far-reaching of all.
However, Jackson’s rise as a sex symbol placed him in a precarious position. Suddenly, he was a black object of white desire in a deeply racist country that sees black men as threatening and potentially corrupting white women and children. It was a risky, even dangerous position to be in. He received death threats, and his body became an object of white fascination, even an unhealthy obsession. In effect, his body became the site where cultural conflicts played themselves out, particularly between white America’s forbidden desire for the taboo or exotic and their fear of the black sexual predator.
But Jackson wasn’t simply a passive object of white fear and desire. He was also a powerful artist — one of the most influential artists of our time. Through his art, he took control of the narratives that were being projected onto him and then disrupted and diffused them in complex ways. This aspect of his art functions at a deep psychological level: the level of affect. It bypasses the conscious mind — in fact, it doesn’t make much sense to the conscious mind — and instead speaks directly to the subconscious, destabilizing and reconfiguring the fears white Americans have projected onto non-white men for centuries.
Jackson’s methods are complicated and elusive, and they became even more sophisticated as he matured as an artist. Therefore, the full power of his art is difficult to measure and comprehend. However, if we take the time to look carefully at his work, we can begin to uncover the artistic strategies he developed for neutralizing a global audience’s affective responses to racial cues — in effect, rewiring their “gut reactions” to difference. In this way, he was able to fight racism at its deepest, most primal level. Investigating Jackson’s art therefore has profound implications not only for how we see his work and legacy but also for how we see art more generally and its potential to bring about lasting social change.
Note: This essay is the first of a four-part series. Part 2 takes a close look at some of Jackson’s important early work, including Thriller, to discover how he addressed white fears of black men in psychologically complex ways.
