As racial theorists like to say, “it’s all about context.”  Well, here is some recent Harvard context which may be illuminating.  I will let readers debate and decide.

Two months ago, a young African American man was shot by (allegedly) another African American man in the basement of Kirkland House, a Harvard campus dorm.  Neither was a Harvard student.

Text messages sent by the victim, along with a pound of marijuana and approximately $1000 found with his body, suggest that he was a drug dealer.  The alleged shooter, up from New York, was (and possibly remains?) the long term boyfriend of a Harvard co-ed.  Meanwhile, a second female student, who was suspected to have given the shooter a Harvard access card and had past disciplinary problems, was banned from campus and denied graduation with her class.  All of which, of course, roiled the campus and inflamed racial tensions.

The second female student told the Boston Globe, “I do believe I am being singled out…  The honest answer to that is that I’m black and I’m poor and I’m from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way… It’s something that labels me as different from everyone else.” (more…)

I remember reading years ago that Lisa Marie said that, in private, Michael Jackson spoke in a perfectly normal (well…) male voice.  By the magic of Google, I found the piece and present it to you.  Tina Brown, Washington Post, March 2005.  Ms. Brown has a very sharp and unsparing take on America’s Peter Pan of Pop.  And in the Rolling Stone interview to which Ms. Brown refers, Lisa Marie is even more devastating about the man behind the man-boy mask:

Read Brown’s Article Here.

An interview with Jackson’s ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley by Chris Heath in Rolling Stone in April 2003 would support the “secretly sane” theory. “I was always saying [to Jackson] people wouldn’t think I was so crazy if they saw who the hell you really are,” Presley told Heath. “That you sit around, and you drink and you curse and you’re [expletive] funny and you have a bad mouth, and you don’t have that high voice all the time. I don’t know why you think that works for you, because it doesn’t anymore.” (more…)