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So I've disproved the majority of the popular beliefs about what Rougela is based on.  But now it's your turn to ask:  Why would the Japanese creators base Rougela on something like Little Black Sambo?  Why would they intentionally create an overtly racist character?

The answer lies in Japan's homogenous society.  The country doesn't have the ethnic diversity that America has, and what the typical American thinks of as black people are pretty much non-existent in the land of the Rising Sun.  Therefore, nobody's going to be upset when someone like Rougela or Dragon Ball Z's Mr. Popo appear in children's shows.  To the Japanese, they're just these funny characters who appear in the movies and in rap videos.  Gross overgeneralization?  Perhaps, but it's been my experience that Japanese people don't have the daily contact with black people that Americans have.

"Even so, black people need to chill out and shouldn't get so bent out of shape over one character."  The reason people are so upset over Jynx in the first place is because African Americans were some of the most cruelly stereotyped people historically.  Just take a look at some of the cartoons released when animation was just taking off as a medium in the early 20th century.  "Sunday Go to Meetin' Time" shows a black man constantly running into bad luck after sneaking out of church to steal some chickens.  "Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat" has a huge and appalling collection of black stereotypes.  For a while, Tom (the cat in Tom and Jerry) was constantly afraid of a black maid, Mammy Two-Shoes.  There are a lot more (read this Wikipedia article for more details about various racist cartoons), and all of them have been banned from American television.  In fact, Cartoon Network originally intended to air all the Bugs Bunny cartoons for their 2001 "June Bugs" Looney Tunes marathon, but decided not to air eleven of the cartoons because they were so racially offensive. 

But don't think for a minute that Rougela is the only character being picked on.  In May of that same year, another article surfaced about both Rougela and Mr. Popo (from Dragon Ball Z) that was brought to my attention through the famous Dragon Ball Z fansite, DBZ Uncensored.  The article, which repeats some of the same arguments from the first article, added Mr. Popo into the mix, proving that the ice pokemon isn't the only character being targeted by the media.  While Mr. Popo is too embedded in the Dragon Ball Z storyline to erase (unlike Rougela), American localizers have found a way to censor the character.  In early 2004, Viz, the company that translates and publishes the English language version of the Dragon Ball manga, began to digitally reduce the size of Mr. Popo's lips in an effort to soften its racist image (click on the images, provided by Daizenshuu EX, to see larger versions).  And in February 2004, a Spongebob Squarepants valentine was recalled because a printing error caused it to resemble the Little Black Sambo a little too closely.  

The debate that Mrs. Weatherford started all those years ago was that, despite the pokemon's supposed origin or character model, the end product still resembles African American stereotypes a little too much. Was Mr. Popo based on a black person? No, but it's still close enough to the old stereotypes to be offensive to some people. Were the misprinted Spongebob valentines based on a black person? No, but it's still close enough to the old stereotypes to be offensive to some people.

Was Jynx based on a black person? No, but it's still close enough to the old stereotypes to be offensive to some people. That's why the character's caused so much controversy.