Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
- The strange story of Michael Jackson is especially strange for his loyal black fans, who watched with pride as he became the biggest entertainer of the last quarter-century.
Yet loving Michael Jackson – his artistic genius and the many trails he blazed – has often meant looking the other way when it came to his appearance. Over the years, his face became increasingly unrecognizable, amusing and perplexing his fans while becoming the living embodiment of the identity crises many black Americans have struggled with for almost 400 years.
Jackson family orders second autopsy on star’s body. A12.
Like “The Cosby Show,’’ which debuted around the reign of Jackson’s “Thriller,’’ he made race seem revolutionarily inconsequential without rendering it irrelevant, in much the same way Barack Obama would do decades later.
