freaks are called freaks.

While the digital curation I completed as a Crossroads Fellow (in collaboration with Jared Rodriguez, Ph.D.)  that serves as a companion guide to my forthcoming book (under contract with University of Chicago Press) does not account for the full 50 years of Michael’s life, it does provide an account of why, on June 25, 2009, the world stopped to acknowledge the solemn fact that a Black man from the Midwest named Michael Joe Jackson was no more. As this curation will reveal through an engagement with Michael’s genre-rupturing music and ghostly legacy, no account of Michael Jackson’s Black life is sufficient without foregrounding how his art and public performances were fundamentally braided by his religious world. Underlying this thesis is a broader one: people throughout the world struggle to account for Michael Jackson’s great and terrible Black life precisely because they do not know how to account for the lived religious experiences of Black creative artists who, through their lives, create haunting heterotopias that transgress the terms of order policing the normative world. 

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Heterotopic spaces, as described by philosopher Michel Foucault, offer alternative realities that challenge dominant social norms and power structures. While these spaces often evoke notions of liberation, autonomy, and subversion, it is essential to acknowledge the ambivalence and dark undercurrents that can exist within them. Heterotopic spaces are often conceived as sites of liberation, providing individuals or communities with a refuge from oppressive social structures. They offer a semblance of autonomy, where different rules, values, and identities can flourish. Examples include countercultural communities, artistic enclaves, or alternative lifestyle communes. These spaces allow for the exploration and expression of identities and practices that challenge mainstream norms, fostering a sense of freedom and self-determination. This digital project invites you to consider the implications of reading Michael Jackson as a heterotopic Black artist, Neverland Valley Ranch as a religious heterotopia, and his designation as King of Pop as a heterotopic coronation that unmasked the fantastic, haunting potential pervading the domain of popular culture in the United States.

Alongside being recognized as one of the greatest entertainers to ever live, this digital curation makes the case that Michael Jackson is one of the most significant and troubling religious figures to emerge from within the matrix of the modern world. The need for Michael to remain (even in death!) a secular figure whose religious life was little more than a constellation of “private” beliefs and convictions reveals the degree to which, when deployed within the domain of popular culture in the United States, secularization exists, primarily, as an ordering technology strategically deployed to constrain the haunted and haunting religious worlds of Black creative artists whose religious communities refuse to legitimize and sanctify the principalities and powers governing the nation-state. Put another way, Michael Jackson was not secularized because his religious convictions and practices were a mystery to journalists, record executives, industry insiders, and the public: Michael Jackson was and remains secularized because his life was braided to the Watchtower Society, a theocratic religious community better known as Jehovah’s Witnesses who refuse to acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States government and preach the imminent end of all earthly regimes of power. In order for Michael to reign as the King of Pop, his religion, first, had to be suppressed and privatized. 

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As a scholar and theorist of religion committed to the study of lived religious experience in the United States, I offer this digital curation as part of an emerging conversation that invites colleagues across multiple fields and disciplines to take seriously the lived religious experiences of Black creative artists who live and die within the region and shadow of death and under the sign of celebrity. This digital curation asserts that the study of lived religious experience must also account for the pained bodies of gifted Black boys; the flashing bulb of paparazzi; the sweat-soaked stage; the blood-soaked gurney; the effervescent crowd; the inconvenient allegations emanating from the mouths of children; the needle and the syringe; the sequined glove waving from the inside of an ambulance; golden caskets laying in the center of U.S. arenas; and the downcast shadow of every freak who is called freak because someone else lacks the courage to behold themselves as they truly are. 

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This digital curation also asserts that any account of Michael Jackson must necessarily provide an account of antiblackness. Foregrounding antiblackness as a governing analytic of all discourses pertaining to Black life is often seen as a tacit form of support for accused Black creative artists that denies or somehow suppresses the veracity of the allegations made by their accusers. The comparativist approach to celebrity discourse in general makes the task of the scholar even more difficult. If the cacophony surrounding Michael Jackson’s Black life and ghostly afterlives is the exact same noise surrounding Woody Allen, Robert Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Orenthal James Simpson, do we need archives or citations or bibliographies or entire fields of study when a simple subscription to a movie streaming service or the simple annotation of a TMZ headline would more than suffice? 

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In my training as a scholar of religion, I am convinced that the visceral -and reflexive- refusal to account for the antiblackness of Michael Jackson’s life is rooted in the fictive assumption that one cannot account for both antiblackness, religion, and social accountability within the same case study. Such assumptions erroneously assert that if we account for the logic of antiblackness that made Michael suffer unjustly from his childhood onward, too many people will feel pity for him and will begin attending to his haunting, troubled Black life with care -too much care. In order to truly support accusers, the logic continues, we must institute a binary and we must create a monster whom we can constrain to one side of that binary. This monster of culture and renown (whose advent into the world is never ex nihilo -out of nothing) must be flattened and circulated through media outlets as a one-dimensional, soulless villain with a simple narrative that requires no care, no archival witness, no citational ethics, no rigor at all. While this posture may gain approval on certain social media platforms, scholars are called to tarry in the inconvenient places in order to provide the most rigorous account available. We are called to not just reflect the dominant account: we are charged to excavate the account until we discover the various mechanisms of power responsible for producing the account that is taken to be fixed, absolute, and beyond the messy process of decoding. Whether the results of our study trends or not should not occupy the eye of our concern. 

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Moreover, any rigorous account of Michael Jackson will reveal how Michael’s melodies were tethered to a pained Black life and that pained Black life, itself, was tethered to a haunting and that haunting remains to this day bound within what James Baldwin termed “the burning, buried guilt” of the United States of America. Removing a hit song from the airwaves may make a consumer feel good about themselves for a season, but it will never exorcise the haunting --and it is the haunting (not Michael’s troubled ‘private’ world) -- that publics are truly seeking to exorcise. To be clear, this curation is not suggesting that we relegate the harrowing accusations of Michael’s accusers to the background. The ghastly allegations made against Michael are part of the warp and weft of his life. Far from saying we should privilege one above the other, I am suggesting we do something far more unsettling: we must recognize that both the allegations made against Michael and the antiblackness he experienced throughout his life, up to the moment of death, have never resided comfortably on either side of a polarity. This study invites the reader to consider how both exists in braided horror. 

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Thus, to only examine the purported harm committed by a Black person apart from the social, political, and religious conditions that govern the possibilities or impossibilities of said individual is to reproduce the antiblack, punitive logics that would have us to believe that the problem solely lies with “bad” individuals and never with powers, principalities, and governmentalities. While I believe we must account for the unprecedented power that Michael wielded and how that power provided him --at the very least-- with the capacity to harm vulnerable children and evade accountability, there must also be an account of the antiblack world that labels Black boys as freaks, considers the welted bodies of children as generative, signifies Black men as wackos, and venerates juridical structures with an aracial, mystifying infallibility. This counter configuration is, admittedly, less appealing to mass markets that require the polarities of good/evil, innocence/guilt, pure/corrupt, right/wrong be irrefutable categories upheld in every book, article, or public-facing essay. The paradox that the world must face head on, however, is that the same world that demands clear answers and simple adjudications produces haunting, welted witnesses that refuse to offer the clarity, social absolution, or closure that governments and societies need in order to promote the illusion of social order.