Motherless Children - Why Did Michael Jackson 'Blank' Their Mothers?

Patricia Williams is a Columbia law professor, a columnist for The Nation, a mother, a woman of color, and an astute observer of human nature who never fails to cut to the heart of the matter. (Her February 2007 "Morning in America" piece beautifully encapsulated the Obama/Clinton race/gender debate within the context of a group of women sharing breakfast.)

Once again, Williams forthrightly tackles what most others dance around in an unblinking examination of the very complex contradictions inherent in Michael Jackson's life, death, media image, and altered reality. In "Mirror Man" she looks at our fascination with him; the terrible childhood abuse his father Joe Jackson still denies dishing out; the "mind-boggling malpractice" that supported his drug abuse and his extreme plastic surgeries; the disturbing allegations that his three children have no biological connection to him; and his even more disturbing need to blank out any presence of a mother in his children's lives:

Their conception was accomplished as a made-to-order, cash-on-the-barrelhead commercial transaction....Reportedly, the women who gestated them carried anonymously donated eggs fertilized by sperm from secret donors....Deborah Rowe, Jackson's ex-wife and the surrogate who carried his oldest two children to term, describes being inseminated "like a horse"; she then received around $9 million to give up any claim to them. On the birth certificate of Jackson's youngest child, the space for "mother" is left blank.

As a nation, we became irate when Octomom Nadya Suleman used in vitro fertilization to instantly create her longed-for 'large family' without benefit of an involved 'father.' But when Jackson exorcised any presence of a 'mother' from the lives of his two sons and daughter, we accepted his behavior as eccentricity.

Many have voiced their concerns over this, though most (like the author of "Michael Jackson: Talented Yet Troubled" from the blog Mothers Raising Boys) don't have a gig at The Nation as Williams does. In the midst of the frenzy surrounding the extended mourning of the King of Pop, Williams will likely get flak for "Mirror Man." But like all concerned mothers, it's the children she worries about -- the children who called Michael Jackson 'father,' and the child that man once was despite an upbringing that included being held upside down and punched repeatedly by his father.

"He mimed a narrative of constant paradox and infinite suffering," Williams writes about Jackson, and closes with her fears that his three children will end up with their "ignorant, brutish" grandfather. Should that come to pass, if that isn't an example of "constant paradox and infinite suffering" for yet another generation of young Jacksons, then I can't imagine what is.

Related article: Remembering Michael Jackson and the Woman Behind "Man in the Mirror"