A strange thing has happened to Michael Jackson in death. In life, he metamorphosed before our very eyes, from a cute black kid into a strange, pallid man with a sharp, brittle nose. Blame an obscure pigmentation problem, insecurities inspired by a very odd childhood or just a particularly malevolent plastic surgeon - but there it is. To compare his five year old face with his 50 year old face still makes you go "wha?"

However, to judge by last night's memorial show in LA, it would seem Jackson has become a black man once more. Rev. Al Sharpton was pretty adamant on this point in his address. The combined effect of the celebrities who paid tribute to him - Stevie Wonder, Spike Lee, Smokey Robinson, Sean Combs among them - plus Jackson's gathered family (most of whom are unafflicted by pigmentation problems) put the late singer back into a context that Jackson seemed to spent his life Moonwalking away from. Even Jackson's own children now look more obviously the product of a mixed-race marriage - didn't they used to be blonde?

Sharpton said: "He brought down the color curtain. It was Michael Jackson who brought blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos together". Musically, he certainly did - was already doing it when he still looked like the kid in the picture.In his videos and live performances, he aspired to too - one of his last requests for the O2 shows was a reportedly of choir of schoolchildren who, he stipulated, had to represent each race on earth. Perhaps his weird appearance appealed to many of his fans, his face representing to them a racial panopoly as much as his songs did - as if he were a mid-morph screen grab from the Black or White video? Perhaps it took a white black man to open the door for black black men, as Sharpton suggested? Or perhaps he committed the ultimate betrayal and his subsequent actions are the product of racial guilt? Awkward questions - and I don't feel it's my place to tackle them all.

However, I do feel that any narrative the paints Michael Jackson as a straightforward black role model, on a level with Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama, is, at best, wishful thinking - and at worst a whitewash. A comment by the British rapper Roots Manuva sticks in my mind from a few years ago in this regard. A magazine Q&A asked: "What one present would you give to anyone in the world?". He answered: "I'd give Michael Jackson the face he had when he was a little boy". Don't think this is quite what he meant.