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Did WE Sexually Abuse Michael Jackson?
Getting Real about Sex Abuse and Black Boys

My earliest vivid memory as a child was at a Jacksons' concert. I was four years old, wearing a blue dress with white polka dots, and Michael and his brothers were on a stage below me singing and dancing. At some point, the stage lights dimmed and there was a spotlight on Michael as he began to sing a love song solo. The changes in lighting and the shift in the mood of the music created in me a deep feeling of intimacy with Michael, and I remember thinking, "Now that we're alone, this would be a good time to go talk to him." So I got up from my seat and started down the stairs of the concert hall to see my friend Michael. At some point half-way down my journey toward Michael, my mother stopped me and carried me back to our seats. And I remember feeling confused and upset, thinking to myself, "why won't she let me go talk to Michael?"

Like many children throughout the world, I experienced Michael Jackson as my personal friend. This feeling hasn't completely left me as an adult, evidenced by the way my friends and I discuss the latest sex abuse scandal surrounding Michael as if we know him, as if he is a personal friend. From, "I just can't imagine Michael doing something like that," to "You know Michael's father abused all of them and that's why he's abusing these children," we as a culture feel intimately connected to Michael in a way that leads us to theorize what is really going on in this sex abuse scandal.

How did millions of people come to feel as if they have an intimate connection to Michael Jackson? There are the obvious answers: his enormous talent and charisma, his incredible exposure in the media, us having "watched him" grow up "before our eyes," and more. But I would like to suggest that there was another key factor in how so many of us came to feel so close to Michael. And that factor is sex.

From the time Michael was six years old, the American public interacted with Michael as a sexual being. We were encouraged, even manipulated, to enjoy the novelty of a mini-James Brown, a black boy-child who could pine and swoon and gyrate like the best of them. We've all heard the biographies of Michael over the years where he expressed deep confusion over the sexual-romantic content of his own performances as a child, frequently asking his older brothers to explain to him what was going on. We've seen the childhood footage of Michael, where screaming mobs of people desperately "want" him - fainting, swooning, and trying to touch him - and the expressions of fear and confusion on his face. I remember once watching an interview of Michael's older brother, Jermaine, who described a time when Michael asked him to explain one of the love songs he had to perform that night. And when Michael asked the question, Jermaine suddenly realized that Michael had never experienced the sexual-romantic longing that he was being asked to perform.

That we as a culture "got off" on a child singing "like an adult" indicates that we are all implicated in the inappropriate adultification of Michael. And the fact that the thing that "got us off" was his ability to perform romantic sexual desire through song and dance, "like an adult," implicates all of us in the inappropriate sexualization of Michael as a black boy child. Was it an accident that we, as an American public, had a sexualized relationship with this black boy in our popular imagination? Of course not. Our inappropriate sexual relationship with Michael was part and parcel of cultural processes that socialize us into distorted perspectives about black men's sexuality and their humanity.

Seeing black men as sexual from birth, as exempt from pre-sexual childhood innocence, makes it easier for the American public to believe that black men are in fact sexual aggressors when accusations of sex abuse are launched against them. This hypersexualization of black boy children reflects a deep history of racism that strategically over-sexualizes black men so that it will be easy to rally public support to attack any black man through claims of sex abuse. This was the logic of the lynch mob. This is how black men continue to be attacked in the press and criminal justice system. This is what is happening to Michael (Kobe, R. Kelly, and the list goes on).

Simultaneously, I do not suggest in any way that we should not deal, openly and publicly, with the reality that some black men (and I would add black women, white men, white women, etc.) sexually abuse children. As a former rape educator who spent years working on issues of the sexual abuse of children within the black community, I refuse to accept that we should go silent about sex abuse of children by black men, simply because we know how racism targets black men in this area. Yes, if a black man gets caught up in the criminal justice system and the press for sex abuse he will receive unfair treatment. But no, that does not mean that we then ignore that some black men do sexually abuse children. And for most of us, it is difficult to hold both of these positions at the same time - to simultaneously stand up for the rights of the victimized child and the rights of the victimized adult black man. We tend to believe in innocent victims and bad oppressors. And we tend to have trouble seeing how one person, like a black male pedophile, might inhabit both victim and oppressor roles, simultaneously.

But what is missing from our public conversation about black men and the sexual abuse of children is that black men were once children and many of them were sexually abused. And, I would like to suggest that not only are many black male children merely sexually abused, individually, through inappropriate physical contact with the sexual parts of the body; but that black men, as a group, from the youngest of ages, experience collective inappropriate sexual attention from every segment of society. I see it every time I am in a grocery store and a black male baby smiles at a female cashier, and is then teased for "flirting with her." I see it in a million ways every day and it infuriates me that another black boy's innocent desire for connection with other human beings is inappropriately sexualized. And this is how sexual abuse always functions. Children's very human need for love, attention, and physical contact gets perverted into sex by a confused adult...an adult who has never recovered from when the same thing happened to them. And, perhaps, most painfully, I see the effects of this sexual socialization on adult black men, who, frequently, have internalized the idea that the only way to reach for contact with other human beings is sexually. Unfortunately, for some men, and many children, this confusion can play out even when they reach for contact with children.

Did WE, the American public, participate in the sexual abuse of Michael when he was a boy child through inappropriate sexual attention? Did we abandon him to this cycle of sexualized racism (or racialized sex abuse), and fail to stand up against the fact that he was receiving sexual attention that was inappropriate for his age?

And, if we honestly face the roles we each play in the never-ending sexualization of black boys and men, then how will we handle the latest Michael Jackson scandal - this familiar scenario where a black man is being attacked for having (potentially) sexually abused a child, which means being attacked for having acted out as an adult the sexual abuse he experienced as a child?

Hopefully, we won't simply jump on the bandwagon. Hopefully, we'll do something different this time.

Nikki Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on black girls' relationship with visual media.