Notebook: Michael Jackson: beyond the pale: In seeking whiteness, the superstar is not the only one to reject the Sixties statement that Black is Beautiful

WHEN casting started recently on The Jacksons: An American Dream, word quickly got around among the producers of the upcoming mini-series that the singer had discovered the perfect actor to play him aged five. But when the kid turned up to audition, he turned out to be white.

So Michael Jackson wants to be seen as a white boy. The story may be apocryphal, but is widely believed. That's not surprising. We're told he has already had his nose narrowed, his hair straightened, his skin lightened. He never goes out in the sun. So why shouldn't he be a white boy if he longs to that much? The world's a big place, with room for all sorts. Marilyn became blonde. And Dukakis, as far as anyone knows, still wears stacked heels. As Suzanne Moore wrote in the Guardian last week, 'the only thing Michael Jackson can be accused of is wanting to be someone else. Is that so wrong?'

America's most famous black man is on a two-month European tour to promote his latest album, Dangerous. Since he arrived in London last Wednesday, he has staged three Wembley concerts, visited a hospital, handed pounds 200,000 to the Prince's Trust, and danced an impromptu pirouette to stop a deranged fan throwing himself off the top of a six-storey building.

But not everyone is cheering. 'It must register on his fans,' says Stuart Hall, Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a well-known commentator on black issues, 'that what Michael Jackson is doing is a repudiation of being black.'

SUCH self-repudiation was given 'scientific' credence at the end of the 19th century. Along with gripe water and the Great Railway Timetable, the Victorians also bequeathed us anthropometry, the systematic measurement of human dimensions. Early studies of evolution led them to develop a whole range of theories associating biological race with cultural and intellectual development. Anthropometric research would substantiate these ideas.

The Victorians were particularly fascinated by the Indian caste system, which divided Hindu society into four groups, or varnas. The highest of these are pale-coloured and fine-featured, the lowest are dark. High-caste Indians whisper that the low-born have irregular, coarse and fleshy faces. And the very word caste comes from the Portuguese for 'pure stock'. It is linked, etymologically, to the Latin for 'chaste'.

Sir Herbert Hope Risley, director of ethnography in the Indian Civil Service spent most of his life measuring the noses of thousands of people in northern India. His obsession produced Risley's Orbito-Nasal Index. With his calipers, Risley found (at least to his satisfaction) that people from higher castes had narrower, sharper noses than those from lower castes. Risley's life's work, The People of India, made one conclusion when it was published in 1908; 'a man's social status varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose'.

Has Michael Jackson read Risley? Almost certainly not. Neither have the young men and women who advertise for marriage partners every Sunday in the Hindustan Times. One after the other, the small ads call for spouses, with 'wheat-coloured complexion and sharp features'. Even a Green Card isn't as important as a fair skin.

The fear of being associated with a dark race led Merle Oberon, even before she went to Hollywood, to hide her beginnings. Dark-eyed and exotic, she insisted to her public that she was born in Tasmania. In private she tried to lighten her skin with fierce cosmetics that did nothing but ruin her complexion. All to hide the truth, which her biographer discovered quite by chance after her death, that she was an Anglo- Indian born in Bombay.

Black is Beautiful was meant to do away with all of that. The slogan was coined in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael, the guru of the black power movement, and taken up the following year by Martin Luther King. What would he have made of Michael Jackson? Would he have said the singer was betraying Black is Beautiful?

HE WOULD have a good reason to. The US entertainment business may not be as negrophobic as it was in Ms Oberon's day, but it still wants its stars to be white, or failing that, pale. The same, often, goes for politics, so much of which is performed on television. Alice Walker, the black American writer best known for her novel, The Colour Purple, reserves her deepest scorn for America's black political leaders, who have all, she says, with the exception of Malcolm X, married women distinctly less black than themselves. She castigates American blacks for spitting 'in our black mother's face'.

'The black black woman,' she wrote in an essay in 1982, 'is our essential mother - the blacker she is the more us she is - and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.'

America is far from the only country to prize whiteness above black. When Jimmy Carter appointed America's first black ambassador, it was to Tanzania. President Nyerere nearly refused his credentials, reportedly because he wanted a white ambassador 'like everyone else got', an aide said.

Today in Nairobi, a well-known plastic surgeon narrows the nostrils of at least one wealthy African every month. Two or three times a week he is called upon to reduce lip sizes. 'Clients bring me pictures of Michael Jackson and say, 'Can you make me look like that?' ' The longing is unreserved. His clients are equally divided between men and women.

If Africans bring him photographs, so do black people in east London when they visit Norma Vidler, a beauty therapist best known for her work repairing the damage done by cosmetic creams that promise to lighten skin.

The active ingredient in these creams is an industrial bleach called hydroquinone used extensively in photographic processing. In the UK, it is illegal to sell creams that contain more than 2 per cent of hydroquinone, but many products are imported illegally, mostly from West Africa.

Most of these display no labelling, and those that do use code words. Their purpose is to 'treat freckles and age spots'. They promise 'clear, even- toned skin'. The truth, says Ms Vidler, is that 'hydroquinone destroys the skin cells. It destroys the pigment. It makes the skin very rough and orange-peely, and can cause huge bumps.' She recently saw one case where even the lightest peeling treatment caused the skin to come away in huge chunks. 'The effect is devastating. But people still use it.' Why?

'So many say they are Michael Jackson fans,' she says. 'They use these creams to make themselves look more like him. But I've seen the results. And I think he's done a great disservice to his race.'

It is a view Professor Hall shares. 'Ever since Black is Beautiful, looks, colour, hair - all the things that make up race - have become highly politicised. (For many black kids) their bodies are the only cultural capital they have. You see black kids in the street. You don't know where they come from or if they have a job. So their street style, their clothes, their hair, is of paramount importance. It's so trendy to be black. Among some kids it's the trendiest thing going.'

Last night, Michael Jackson played at Wembley. Most of his fans were white. The trendy black kids stayed away. His music is neither soul nor rap. It's pop, they say. It's white.

Earlier this year he went to Africa. In the Ivory Coast they made him an honorary tribal king. That was the only good thing that happened. When Mr Jackson got off the plane in Abidjan, he held a handkerchief over his nose. In Tanzania, his next stop, he raced past the waiting foreign minister, and fled into his air-conditioned car. His black fans turned on him. Their welcome had been spurned, they said; their blackness insulted. The newspapers attacked his nose job, his hankering to be paler.

'This mutant genius, this voluntary mutant, this recreated being, bleached, neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, so delicate, so frail . . .' sputtered the newspaper Ivoir'soir. He cut short his trip and flew back to white America.

(Photograph omitted)