Derek Jeter's Not Black Enough? Joe Torre Discriminates? What's the Truth?

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Depending on whom you ask, Detroit Tigers designated-hitter Gary Sheffield is either refreshingly candid in an era of canned, controversy-free responses, or he's a loose cannon too ready to shoot off at the mouth.

It was just a few weeks ago that Sheffield, who is black, stirred controversy when he claimed it was easier for Major League Baseball "to control" Latino players than black players when asked why there were diminishing numbers of black athletes in the sport.

"You're going to see more black faces, but there ain't no English going to be coming out. ... [It's about] being able to tell [Latino players] what to do--being able to control them," Sheffield told GQ magazine.

"Where I'm from, you can't control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man," said Sheffield. "These are the things my race demands."

Sheffield's latest headlines come from his claim that Yankees Manager Joe Torre treats his black players and white players differently. Sheffield was a Yankee from 2004 to 2006. During the interview, which will air tomorrow night on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumble, Sheffield stopped short of calling Torre a racist, but said there was a noticeable difference in the treatment that black and white players receive on the team. 

"I know when I was there, the couple of blacks that were there, every one of them had an issue with the organization," Sheffield tells interviewer Andrea Kremer, according to Newsday. "They had an issue with (manager) Joe Torre. They weren't treated like everybody else."

But Sheffield was just getting started. When it was pointed out that one of the most popular Yankees in team history, Derek Jeter, is black and appeared to have a very cordial relationship with Torre, Sheffield's response is reportedly that Jeter "ain't all the way black."

Whoa...whoa...whoa, Gary. 

I've never played Major League Baseball, so I may have to take Sheffield at his word that, at least from his perspective, Latino and black players are perceived differently in the league by baseball management. Likewise, I've never dressed up in Yankee pinstripes, so I have no idea if black and white players were actually treated differently in the clubhouse during Sheffield's tenure there.

But Jeter "ain't all the way black"? I mean...come on man. Are we still there...in 2007?

For the record, Jeter had a black father and a white mother. And Sheffield's comment smacks of ignorance. I often wonder about the unique catch-22 of being a part of two cultures but often never being truly accepted by either. (See also: Being Biracial, A Personal Account in the May 2007 issue of DiversityInc)

And when I first heard Sheffield's remarks, I thought of the old rhyme: "If you're black, get back; if you're brown, stick around; if you're yellow, you're mellow. If you're white, you're all right." I had hoped that the feelings behind sayings like these went the way of the paper-bag party, a New Orleans custom where a brown paper bag was stuck on the door and anyone darker than the bag was denied entrance.

Unfortunately, if athletes like Sheffield are still spouting off archaic notions of what it means to truly be black, then clearly we still have more road to travel. 

And for the record, Sheffield, if the black community is to disown Derek Jeter for not being black enough, then there are others we must boot off the island as well. Academy Award winner Halle Berry (white mother, black father); NBA all-star Grant Hill (black father, biracial mother); Jimi Hendrix (black, white and Cherokee); Smokey Robinson (of black and white decent); Malcolm X (half black, one-quarter Grenadian and one-quarter white American); and, of course, Tiger Woods, whose mother is Thai and father is black. Thanks to Woods, the term "cablinasian" was introduced to the lexicon, in which Woods describes himself as one-quarter black, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-eighth white, and one-eighth Native American.

Cablinasian? Sounds silly to me. But perhaps such microscopic detail to our ancestry is exactly the direction in which Gary Sheffield would like to see us move.

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