Money Whitens

Some have noticed that the former home run hitting baseball player Sammy Sosa is turning whiter as he grows older.  His skin is turning lighter and he has taken to wearing green contact lenses.  Sammy contends that he is under going a skin rejuvenation treatment and that the side effect is that his skin has grown lighter.  Who knew that bleach could rejuvenate skin?  It reminds one of the excuses Michael Jackson used to give for why his skin lost pigmentation.  I believe Jackson said something like he forced doctors to repeatedly inject him with a disease called vitiligo until it took.    Or that he got the disease by accident.  One or the other.

In countries like Brazil and the Dominican Republic the entire class structure can be set up on the cornerstone of skin color.  Some say it is a hold over from the bad old days when all the masters were white and all the slaves where black.  That the slave mentality is still present in some shows up in phrases like “Money Whitens”  or in rejuvenation experiments or the mysterious contraction of rare diseases.

Image via Wikipedia

In the United States, this behavior is generally considered bizarre especially since one of the richest women in America,Oprah Winfrey is black.  One of the most popular athletes of all time, Michael Jordan, is black.  And now, even the president is black.  So access to power, wealth, money and prestige are no longer color coded here.

But Latin American countries may not have entered the modern era yet.  There is an old story that a baby elephant was tied to a cord strong enough to hold it when it was very young.  When the elephant grew large and strong it no longer tried to break the cord because it remembered very clearly that it have never been able to do so in the past.