http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-addiction-to-white-women-or.html

“Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man…I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.”

—Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

I had no comment to offer on Tiger Woods’ indiscretions until I rediscovered the above quote. Fanon so perfectly describes Woods’ sickness that it demanded I proceed. So Tiger, I guess you ain’t had it right ’till you had it white, no?

(SNIP)

If Tiger were worthy of blackness I would label him a “tragic negro.” But, for all of his gifts, he walked away from his ancestry and history. To boot, Woods is self-hating (see this article in Esquire magazine where he revels in telling white folks racist jokes about black people). Predictably, Woods does not have the blues sensibility that comes from a sense of belonging to the Black Atlantic. Tiger does not hear the drum–nor does he ever want to.

I am accommodating. If Woods had said “hey, my mom is Asian, my dad is Black, and I honor both,” I could respect him, rather, against the force of history and commonsense, Tiger in the height of arrogance, invents his own race. Now a “Cablinasian,” Woods is his own man, not standing on the shoulders of those athletes of color who struggled to open doors that he now freely walks through. Tiger is now/was an island onto himself.

During his ascension, I was tempted to let Woods stay in self-imposed racial exile as the multicultural marketing machine that is 21st century corporate America, of which he was one of its greatest examples, used him–and he used it. Like OJ Simpson before him (Hertz jumping, airport running, Nicole Simpson white prize possessing negro that he is) Woods was given a pass into nominal whiteness.

The DSM-IV, the bible for psychotherapists, has a pithy diagnosis for Woods’ behavior: he is addicted to white women.

Please do not misunderstand me. It is not the fact that Woods likes white women that is so troubling. I could care less. What is troubling, is that Tiger so needs a certain type of woman as a means of immunizing himself–or so he thought–from his own blackness. This is a mode of racial fetishizing and obsession that is dishonorable to Woods’ family. It is also, at least in my opinion, doubly insulting to the women that Woods bedded for he did not want them because they happened to be White. No, he wanted these women precisely because they were White. This is a subtle but very important distinction.