Another racial gap—over Michael Jackson

Yesterday, because a copy of the New York Post had been left at a restaurant table where I was seated, I happened to read my first newspaper story about the Michael Jackson child molestation trial, which has been going on since January 31. It was about why the jury had voted to acquit. I haven’t followed the case at all—or anything else about Jackson for the last twenty years—mainly because I cannot think about Jackson without thinking about his facial surgeries, which I find almost as repellant as thinking about people who have had sex change operations.

In any event, it now appears that opinions about the non-guilty verdict are dividing up according to race. According to the New York Daily News,

Americans split sharply along racial lines over the Michael Jackson verdict in a snap poll—a divide that echoes the bitter debate over the O.J. Simpson trial. The new Gallup Poll shows a nearly 2-to-1 majority of whites disagreed with the jury’s decision to acquit the pop star of child molestation charges, while nonwhites agreed with the verdict by a similar margin.

This strikes me as remarkable, given that the only similarity between Simpson and Jackson is that both of them are, or were, notably popular with whites, indeed, they were more popular with whites than with blacks. I knew intelligent young white women in the 1980s who would travel hundreds of miles to see Michael Jackson in concert. The racial differential on the verdict would therefore seem to represent an element of tribalism or amoralism on the part of many American blacks, which leads them defend a fellow black accused of a crime even if they don’t particularly like him, while whites, even if they like someone, are ready to send him to to jail if they think he’s committed a crime.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 15, 2005 08:21 AM | Send