Recently watched Terminator 2 and had forgotten that the super genius computer scientist who invents Skynet is black. This is peak 90's color blindness. The fact that he's black goes totally unremarked upon. It doesn't register at all.
As a friend has pointed out there is very brief window where the world's biggest mega celebrities are black men, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Jordan wins his first ring the same year Terminator comes out. Black men were a universal everyman.
Was also recently watching 90's commercials with the kidsββwhich they are oddly fascinated by btwββthere's a McDonald's commercial with Jordan from this time. Just Jordan eating a burger, drinking a coke, and smiling. That's it. No dialog. Pure super-stardom.
Hard to express just what a cultural force Jordan was, globally. The icon for post Cold War triumphalism. Truly THE EVERYMAN. Anyway, Terminator takes place in LA in 1991. Rodney King riots happen a year later. A lot changes. A harbinger of what was coming down the pike.
Same friend also theorizes that much of the Current Year race anxiety is that black men have lost their shortly held cultural dominance expressed by this period. Rap slowly degraded their status as everymen; they became "marked" again, a tragic self-inflicted wound.
The tragic arc of Bill Cosby probably best represents this larger trend. The rise and fall of the UberBlack is one of the great understudied phenomenons of the last 40 years.
Yes. This a meaningful correction. Jordan was not an "everyman" in the way a sitcom dad is an everyman. But he was a a kind of perfected aspirational figure, universally admired, without any racial dimension to it.
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Jordan, contra LeBron eg, would never go around conspicuously reading the first page of Malcolm X's diary.
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