Is It Correct?

February 4, 2016

Claim: Michael Jackson’s music video for “Black or White” provoked outrage for scenes where the musician destroys racist graffiti.

Notes on Tumblr: ~900

Verdict: False

Buried in a post rightfully attacking the casting of a white actor as Michael Jackson and people using the lyrics to his song “Black or White” in a misguided attempt to defend it is this claim about the ending sequence to the song’s music video. Unfortunately, while the overall point is correct, this claim is not true.

The post contains a link to the rare full version of the video, which it is dubbed “Black or White: The Complete Version”. We’ll see why this is the case later. It indeed does contain scenes of Michael Jackson destroying racist graffiti. But these scenes were not the same when the video debuted on November 21st, 1991 on FOX, MTV, and BET, when this post claims people were outraged by the scene because of its anti-white supremecy statement.

In the original video, the sequence where Michael Jackson destroys cars and windows did not feature any graffiti and carried no political message. According to Michael Jackson, the video was meant to represent “the panther’s animalistic behavior“. It was the scene’s context-free destruction and suggestive imagery that provoked complaints, not any anti-racism message.

That brings us to the Complete Version. Far from being the object of outrage, the racist graffiti was added digitally to this later release of the video to quell outrage by making the destruction more understandable:

As the full video is infrequently shown (even the official upload on Youtube is a short version) and the edited version of the long video has long supplanted the controversial original when shown on TV or released in compilations, it’s easy to assume that the more popular form of the video is the original. However, this is not the case.

Did the video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” inspire anger among white viewers for its statement against racism when it aired on the FOX network in 1991? Not quite.

1:11pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/Z3dXyp219sRso

(Notes: 65)