TURN YOUR WATCH, TURN YOUR WATCH BACK/ABOUT A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS: I only remember two songs from my childhood, listening to “Q-107, Washington’s Top 40!” I remember “Karma Chameleon,” which for some reason I associate with the yellow schoolbus taking me to Jewish day camp.

And I remember “Billie Jean,” on the playgrounds of Shepherd Elementary–a school named after a segregationist, where I doubt I knew fifteen other white kids, but the white kids I did know were almost all in the gifted-and-talented program, because that’s the way racism works. That’s why, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has said so often, you can’t fix police brutality by painting the Policeman Barbies black. “Meritocracy” in a post-colonialist world is the worst caricature of Calvinism, where you’re pre-damned and you’re supposed to like it.

…Anyway. “ABC, easy as 1-2-3” was part of the old hand-clapping rhyme I learned, which sometimes ended, “We got the power!” with the Black Power fist. Nobody ever thought it was weird that a white girl did that ending. Nobody ever thought it was weird that black kids and white kids would pull their eyes up for the “Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief!” rhyme.

(Sometimes we ended the ABC rhyme, “Now you got the chicken power!” I don’t know what that signified!)

On Thursday, I was on my way to my volunteer stint with the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center when an older black woman stopped me to ask if I’d heard: Had I heard that Michael Jackson died? I wasn’t sure it was true until I got home, but I could pretty much hear in her voice that it was real.

Michael Jackson was part of the culture which formed me, and that’s just inescapable, no matter your ultimate judgment of everything we heard about after the ’80s.

Sean Collins does the caveats a lot better than I could.