Beware The Spook

In the Summer of 2026, humanity can’t quite figure out how to escape the spook. When I say “spook”, I am referring to the realm of superficiality and physical appearance. How we view ourselves through an image, and how we perceive others to view our physical appearance is a fascination with body image and our deepest insecurities that can have the most gruesome and violent consequences. The domination of social media on everyday life is an unavoidable reality that has placed our species in a seemingly, infinite loop of fear and despair. A loop that might even force one to pause and make a comparison with Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War film Platoon, rather than a more frivolous connection to the 1990s teen comedy film Dazed & Confused.

In the summer of 2026, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael has made history. Now the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, Michael has shattered cinematic records while simultaneously chronicling the unlikely rise to fame of a black kid from Gary, Indiana. The theme of the film is based primarily around Jackson’s relationship with his father Joe Jackson. The friction between Michael and his father is defined by the historically significant and ongoing African Diasporic dilemma of the “Double-Consciousness”.

The “Double-Consciousness” is a term made famous by the iconic African American sociologist, historian, and Pan-African civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. A leading figure within the Harlem Renaissance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to his role as editor of The Crisis, as well as one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, DuBois achieved much praise for his 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. It was within this publication, well regarded in the disciplines of sociology and African American literature, that DuBois first introduced the term “double-consciousness”. He defines the term as a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

As an African American man, I can assure you that the double-consciousness is a VERY REAL phenomenon that has INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS & EVEN LETHAL consequences. The degree of trauma that I have faced as a Black man raised in the American South can at times be overwhelming and even seem unfathomable. At times I am awestruck and genuinely proud of how I have handled such adversity, and I am even far more impressed and humbled by my ancestors and how they handled the endless, nightmarish spook of white supremacy in the segregated American South of the early 20th century. The amount of dignity, patience, and self-restraint that they had to demonstrate on a daily basis in order to survive lynching, rape, and other forms of malicious violence and injustice is mightily humbling to me.

The fear of judgment from others is the most formidable challenge that lies before today’s generation. Courage is a rare, human attribute. During the second Trump Administration, half a decade after the January 8th Insurrection in Washington D.C., the radical right’s racially exclusive culture is well-represented within the Republican Party. Now regularly described as a sort of cult, the MAGA movement is fundamentally rooted in a radically biased favoritism for President Donald Trump and his policies, defying not only ethics, but at times even basic logic. Now more than at any other time in recent memory the average person, and especially young people, must step up and demonstrate bold courage in the face of an endless loop of deception and intimidation tactics.

The rise of white nationalism has noticeably mimicked the rise of Trump conservatism. This is a development that I sense the average American isn’t noticing or is intentionally turning a blind eye to, for highly suspicious reasons. Race has been the thing that has tormented and plagued American society from the jump start. In fact, well over a million Americans, including over 700,000 Union and Confederate military personnel, perished from 1861-1865 during the American Civil War on battlefields ranging from Antietam and Gettysburg on the East Coast to Vicksburg, Mississippi and the American Western territories in existence during that time. The failure of the sociopolitical effort that was the Reconstruction Era that immediately followed the abolition of slavery in the United States after the war, involving the emancipation of over four million African American slaves, undermined the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments. All three amendments collectively served as the foundation for the implementation of the Reconstruction of the American South following the end of the war in 1865.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, the later legally validating segregation in the Southern United States, immediately followed the Reconstruction Era to close the 19th Century during the height of pseudoscientific racism. Scientific racism was a theoretical movement among prominent white academics within the scientific community at the turn of the century, which notably argued that peoples of Sub-Saharan African descent were inferior to those of European ancestry. It would not be until the modern Civil Rights Movement of the postwar period, following World War II, that segregation was legally dismantled by the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.

However, desegregation in practice required the heroics of civil rights icons such as Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, and many others throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The fruits of their labor yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, the implementation of this legislation within the American South in true practice was very slow and faced much resistance from sociopolitical leaders, conservative public and private institutions including schools and universities, as well as exclusive white communities who with the support of racially bigoted state and local law enforcement agencies utilized a wide variety of violent intimidation tactics against African American citizens as they attempted to exercise their rights as American citizens.

In 2026, Americans are nostalgic about the legacy of Michael Jackson, as directly indicated by the success of the biopic Michael. However, we most certainly must not forget that Jackson was the first African American artist or entertainer to break into a racially exclusive American music industry at the beginning of the 1980s. MTV was publicly adamant about its commitment to excluding black artists from the new up and coming music cable television network. One of the most successful and relevant artists of that era, English rock star David Bowie, was featured interviewing Mark Goodman in 1983 on MTV. Goodman was one of the original hosts, or “video jockeys”, on MTV in the early 1980s. Bowie historically asked Goodman why the network featured so few black artists. Goodman replied in a way that could be interpreted as racially insensitive at best, notably making a remark that white kids in the Midwest might be frightened by the black face of the now deceased legendary music icon Prince on MTV’s then new and innovative 24-hour music video cycle. As one of the few white artists who were bold enough to challenge an openly racist American music industry, Bowie shed light on the unapologetically exclusive nature of racism against black artists during that era. Ironically, 1983 was the same exact year that Jackson’s now immortalized Thriller album completely flipped the script on MTV, forever altering the trajectory of the history of popular culture while simultaneously making Goodman eat his own words.

Arguably the most iconic music video of all time, Michael Jackson’s horror movie-themed Thriller music video is generally considered one of the defining cultural events of 1980s America. It confirmed the popularity of the music video art form in 1980s culture and solidified Michael Jackson as not only the King of Pop, but it also opened the door for the inclusion of among the most well-respected black artists of all time into MTV’s music video rotation and ultimately American mainstream culture. The theme of the music video is based around W.E.B. DuBois’ “Double Consciousness” dilemma in that it speaks to Jackson’s feelings of inadequacy and otherness in the face of a white-dominated American culture. He is depicted as a hideous monster, perhaps hinting at how he viewed himself through the lens of a white American audience that he had performed in front of and before whom he had risen to extraordinary fame for almost the entirety of his young life up to that point in his career.

As sort of a rebuttal to his perceived demonization as a successful black artists and entertainer who had yet to truly break into the mainstream of a racially exclusive American music industry despite the groundbreaking success of the beginning of his solo career independent from his brothers, as highlighted by the historic success of his 1979 Off the Wall album, the video utilizes the pale-skinned zombies that surround him as he sings and dances through a haunted graveyard as a symbolic metaphor characterizing his white American audience. They serve as a source of fear or “spook” in his life. Jackson responds to this adversity with unwavering courage and a passionate commitment to excellence as demonstrated through his trademark vocals and elite dance skills that have been copied and mimicked by a global audience countless times, through a wide variety of media forms, in the over four decades that have passed since the premiere of the music video on MTV in 1983.

Conclusively, this is what Americans need to do at this important juncture in history. We must show courage and do what might be perceived as the unpopular thing to do, because the future depends upon it. The hopes and dreams that all Americans share, of a safe and functional society, are at stake. The credibility of the concept of the American Dream is more jeopardized today than it has been at any other time in recent memory. We just can’t allow ourselves to become enslaved by the fear of the judgment of others. We need to listen to our heart, and march to its beat fanatically. It is time to put on our helmets, strap up our boots, and march to the beat of our hearts as we face those forces of fear, ignorance, and intimidation that have haunted our society for as far back as we can remember. Our descendants will thank us generations from now. It is time for us to earn our Red Badge of Courage, as true defenders of the American Dream, on our way to conquering the spook.