Black or White: Inside Michael Jackson's Most Controversial Short Film

ON NOVEMBER 13, 1991, the world stopped to watch a music video.

Broadcast simultaneously across four major networks and viewed by an estimated 500 million people worldwide, Michael Jackson’s eleven-minute short film for "Black or White" was billed as a triumphant return—his first new visual statement in years. What audiences got instead was something far more unsettling: a dazzling global unity spectacle that ended in rage, destruction, and a prowling black panther disappearing into a dark Los Angeles alley.

The backlash was immediate. The final sequence was censored. Critics were baffled. Parents complained. Executives panicked.

In Black or White: Inside Michael Jackson’s Most Controversial Short Film, Joseph Vogel—author of Man in the Music, widely regarded as the Michael Jackson bible—revisits the moment when pop spectacle collided with America’s unresolved racial anxieties.