This painting is part of a diptych by Nikko Washington depicting the Major League Baseball star Sammy Sosa in his Chicago White Sox uniform. One of the portraits shows Sosa as a dark-skinned person with a white face; the other shows him as a light-skinned person in Black Face. During his heyday, Sosa was considered one of the greatest baseball players in the history of the sport. However, several scandals eventually came to light that cast doubt on his legacy, including doping allegations, and admissions that he “corked” his bat—a banned practice of replacing some of the wood in a bat with cork, making the bat lighter and easier to swing, resulting in the possibility of more home runs. The scandal this diptych points to is Sosa’s use of skin bleaching cream. Born in the Dominican Republic, Sosa was a dark skinned person during his professional baseball career. Shortly after retiring from baseball, his skin gradually became noticeably lighter. Today, it is starkly white. In 2009, Sosa admitted to using bleaching cream every night before going to bed, denying that the choice had anything to do with race. “Skin bleaching is prevalent in many cultures,” says Washington. “When I went to Ghana and Jamaica, it surprised me to see how much bleaching there was. All of these cultures have been colonized, and infused with Western ideas of beauty.”