All throughout high school, I struggled with my identity as a black male. I was called “white” because of the way I talked, and I was called “weird” because of the classes I took. But nothing offended me quite like when I heard people calling me a “sellout.”
This is by far the most offensive thing I have ever been called. Calling me a sellout means you’re accusing me of sacrificing the beauty of my culture for a complete assimilation into “the white way.”
Ouch.
Sure, there are some cases where people can legitimately be considered sellouts (Juan Williams), but I struggled to understand how a columnist for the high school newspaper, who always addressed racial issues, could be deemed a sellout.
Just about any black person who does well in school takes these accusations. It is an epidemic that is exclusive to our culture — the smarter we get, the harder it is to be accepted by the our community.
To many of us, being black means being like what we see on TV: It’s the clothes we wear, the dialect we speak with and the dysfunctional bad attitude we are stereotyped to have. We’ve fallen so deeply into the mold we’ve been granted, we’ve allowed ignorance to be associated with blackness and intelligence to be associated with whiteness.
But how can a culture with predecessors who literally died to teach their children to read no longer value education? Have we lost all sight of what black is?
Black is the innate essence and ability to persevere and make the best out of nothing. In the slave times, they threw us table scraps and we made soul food. In the early 20th century, they threw us oppression and we made the greatest artistic revolution in American history. In the ’60s they threw us Jim Crow and we made a revolution. We’ve taken a beast and made a beauty of her all throughout our history; that is what black is — a hell of a lot more than a platinum chain or a big-bootied beauty.
Being called a sellout because I didn’t accept the media spun perceptions of blackness made me very paranoid and uncomfortable. I was afraid to hang out with white people because I didn’t want to look like a sellout, and when I did, my white “friends” would always make snarky little race jokes to remind me I was different.
On the same note, I didn’t care to hang with a lot of the black people because I felt insulted and betrayed by them, and when I did, they would always make fun of me for trying to be smart, or for hanging out with white people.
There was no place I could really fit in. I ended up feeling isolated most of my senior year.
But was I the one who deserved this title?
Half asleep on a sketchy-looking sofa at my friend’s house last month, I flipped the TV on to “MTV Jams.” It had been years since I watched a long sequence of videos, so I figured I may as well would take a look at them. A music video came on with a very obese Rick Ross flaunting his unreasonable amount of tattoos, unreasonable amount of jewelry and half-naked black women in the background.
At first I laughed to myself thinking it was ridiculous, but then T.I., Nelly, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Birdman and Waka Flocka came on the TV, doing the exact same thing.
But I am the sellout? We see these rappers as well-solidified in blackness, but we never question the fact that they are millionaires in very high places, portraying blacks as violent, egotistical and uneducated for the love of money. They are making a mockery of the position our predecessors fought for and disregarding the potential leadership they can take within society to ensure that they get richer and richer. At the risk of making young black minds believe that foolishness is blackness, and at the cost of putting black women in an even worse position, they are carelessly releasing songs that promote the bad aspects of our culture. They go as far as to imply that if we don’t take part in them, we are not black.
Standing in front of that camera, flashing that gold, that woman or that car, he is the modern day Uncle Tom. Bought like livestock, his millions make record labels billions. He loves his record label like the house slave loved his master. He is selling the negative connotations of his culture for money and protecting the hierarchy that is in place — but it’s the students who do well in school and try to empower their peers we deem sellouts. This simply has to change.
The single greatest problem within the African-American community is ignorance. We’ve been conditioned to accept and foster it through our music, our academics and our behavior; but today, we must reverse this cycle and embrace the power our ancestors fought, protested and died for — the power to be free.
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