Clearly, Sammy wants to ‘be just like Mike’ (Michael Jackson that is)

Of all of the contradictions that characterized the life of Michael Jackson none was more glaring than his singing, with such conviction, the following lyrics from his hit song Black or white:

…if you’re thinkin’ about my baby, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.

For it clearly mattered to him; just as it does to far too many blacks throughout the Americas and all over Africa who have used bleaching agents to make themselves look more white than black.

Now, “just like Mike,” former baseball superstar Sammy Sosa has become the poster boy for this insidious act of self-loathing.  Though, comparing a picture of him taken last year with one taken just last week, Sammy’s racial transmogrification appears even more dramatic.

And, by the way, it’s a whitewash to assert that the steroids he used during his career suddenly turned his skin white after he retired – when, conveniently, he’s no longer exposed to the summer sun on the baseball field that would frustrate the effects of his “skin rejuvenation.”  After all, if steroids were the cause, almost all black football players and most black baseball players would be sporting Mike’s synthetic white pigmentation.

Meanwhile, I’m sure Sammy and his enablers have an equally persuasive explanation for why he has suddenly begun wearing green contact lenses too.

Frankly, the only question is why, Sammy, why?

Of course, his answer to this question would undoubtedly be every bit as truthful and insightful as the answer Michael gave to the question about the paternity of his (white) children.  (He always insisted, as if in a terminal state of delusional fantasy, that he was their biological father.)

But anyone who understands why light-skinned slaves were assigned to the master’s house while dark-skinned ones were relegated to the fields will understand why blacks like Sammy still covet identification with and acceptance by their perceived racial betters.  And, alas, they probably consider the fact that the first black president of the United States is half white as validation of their racial abnegation.

Then of course there’s the fact that Sammy (pictured here with his wife Sonia)  hails from the Dominican Republic (DR) – where a de facto racial apartheid still exists between light-skinned blacks (aka mulatos) who comprise the ruling and social elite and dark-skinned blacks who mulatos looked down upon as little more than latter-day field slaves … from Haiti.

Perhaps you recall how Spike Lee satirized the slave mentality that still causes dark-skinned blacks to feel inferior to light-skinned ones (and light-skinned blacks to feel superior) in his movie School Daze (1988).  Sadly, Oprah and Tyler Perry perpetuate this mentality by casting darker blacks as the bad characters and lighter ones as the good characters in their recently released movie Precious….

Therefore, just imagine the inferiority complex little “Black Sambo” must have suffered  growing up in the DR….

I pity him.