His contribution to the mainstream acceptance of the Afro-Americans in US society notwithstanding, no amount of denials by his camp can cover the fact that MJ transformed his facial features to become less Negroid (and male) in appearance. It is possible to explain the singer's particular obsession with his nose based on accounts of his less-than-normal childhood.

He is said to have had an isolated upbringing marked by the presence of a dictatorial and violent father. He missed out on real childhood since he started performing professionally in early grade school. The King of Pop swears to Peter Pan being a favorite cartoon character. Additionally, he claimed that his original broad nose was a butt of family jokes when he was young. Psychology experts are in speculative agreement that the singer's troubled and depraved upbringing might have had wrought in him lasting emotional scars. Combine these with his adult-period eccentricities that included referring to himself once as Peter Pan and turning his home into a children's fantasy haven he named Neverland, and MJ presents a profile of a man yearning for and stuck on childhood, including the wish of having a 'more beautiful' nose.

Still, the direction of his surgical transformation had been clearly away from the typical Negroid features of African-Americans. With or without verbal confirmation from his plastic surgeons, the evolution of Jackson's photographed/videod appearances unmistakably reveals the aim to look more feminine AND Caucasian. Speculations on his true sexual preferences aside, were the African-American purists, therefore, correct in charging that he had troubles accepting his race, or that he has shunned his genetic roots?

Perhaps, not. From the viewpoint of an African-American nationalist who screams "Black Power," and endorses "Black is Beautiful," Jackson might indeed be perceived as an iconic brother who had unfortunately turned his back on his ethnicity. Cognition of his eccentricities, however, demands a more compassionate perspective that considers the King of Pop as a musical prodigy trapped not only in his childhood but in the discriminatory standards of beauty prevailing during those formative years.

Brought up by a frighteningly stern disciplinarian father, Jackson missed, and apparently yearned for what should have been his childhood phase—the period of the 1960s. The decade was a turbulent but important one for Afro-Americans, highlighted no less by the Civil Rights Movement that sought desegregation and the equality of blacks to the dominant white. Despite its transformational character, however, the decade was marked by vestiges of segregation, advances and setbacks in the cause of black civil rights and the resulting continuing prevalence of race-based discrimination in the national consciousness. One could just imagine the market limitation of the Jackson brothers and other black musical artists back then, and the great struggles those who attempted to cross over to the white audience had to go through. African-American music of the period was influential and at times chart-topping, and black singers of particular genres were crossing over, but all the superstars then were simply exclusively white.

Such was the decade of the 1960s—the setting of much of MJ's deprived childhood but, also, a decade of musical formation and growth. Could it be that the artist got stuck not only in the fantasies of his lost childhood but, as well, by the racist standards of art and beauty that doggedly childhood impressions cast on him by a Caucasian-ruled society? Could it be that in a rather bizarre creative expression of conflicting ethnic and national identity of his never-ending childhood, the great artist of Negroid genes and skin relentlessly tried to physically transform himself to achieve an American's white ideal?

Perhaps, in a twist of national fate, the greatest-selling American pop culture icon who demonstrated the creative genius and greatness of a Afro-American male and, as well, the limits of plastic surgery science, died during the term of the first biracial-but-black-skinned US President. In an eccentrically racist sense, Michael Jackson, the King of Pop—born August 29, 1958 as an adorable infant of Negroid stock and died June 25, 2009 as a porcelain-skinned 50-year old man of Caucasian physiognomy—was both African and (white) American.