African Americans generally disdain other blacks who are perceived as being ashamed of their own race or rejecting it outright.

Which is why for many African Americans, Michael Jackson made for some fairly conflicted feelings.

He was indisputably one of the greatest entertainers in world history, a cultural phenomenon of the highest magnitude.

But there was the whole business of the plastic surgeries and the skin lightening which to many African Americans seemed to point to more than a little uneasiness with the physical features of his African ancestry.

In death, however, all is seemingly being forgiven. Jackson is being embraced with a vengeance by African Americans that seems to line up with that old Latin adage to say nothing ill of the dead.

The New York Times noted this cultural shift in a story whose accompanying photo was pitch perfect. It showed a man hawking Jackson t-shirts in front of a Brooklyn pizzaria named for Malcolm X, the avatar of a fearless form of black pride.

 

An excerpt from the NYT:

Mr. Jackson was to music what Michael Jordan was to sports and Barack Obama to politics — a towering figure with crossover appeal, even if in life some of Mr. Jackson's black fans wondered if he was as proud of his race as his race was of him.

But since his death on Thursday, many African-Americans have embraced Mr. Jackson without ambivalence. In scores of interviews across the country over the weekend, few expressed the kind of resentment some once had for his strangeness, his changing appearance, his distance from the cherubic Michael of the Jackson 5.

Darrell Smith, 40, a filmmaker in Brooklyn, recalled that "when his skin started getting lighter," many black people said Mr. Jackson did not want to be black.

Now, he said: "I honestly feel like I lost a brother. It's a pain inside me."

Again, it's truly noteworthy how death, especially one as tragic as Jackson's, has resolved decades of mixed feelings. It's as though he was a racial prodigal son with staggering gifts for music and entertainment who has been fully accepted back home.