could you not be specific?

Have you been offered such perks??

We have been stigmatized that if we crave what the YT man wants we are coons or sellouts and this equates to people who are sucessful or on their way to being successful whatever that is....
Personally ss far as you don't lose yourself in the process that is your culture and self respect in the process that's cool...having said that there are things you would have to do in order to fit in that you might have to water down your heritage even simple things like how you wear your hair...some people just go too far with with the trying to fit in and make it at all costs mantra...nothing and no amount of money is worth losing your sense of pride and culture over because when it all goes south and believe me it eventually does those are the things that you can count on
On the flip side i cannot stand people who have wasted their time having multiple women and kids in addition to being irresponsible having a dig sounds like sour grapes...

If they wanted me to go on record and say the moon is made of cheese, then yes.

BP - gonna try and expand the scenario a bit and say I think you understimate how much in the gutter the common mentality is? Sellout for financial independence? Most get labelled a sellout just for having a career...and the joke is the ones usually making the accusation are the living tramps - know too many of these tramps who sleep with the very same people they accuse you of selling out to and think the slate can be wiped clean just because they attended a protest march. Know one running up and down with Ligali putting on a front - which to me is another form of sellout, preaching anti-system rhetoric from your system provided roof.

Not to forget the sistas, even back when living at my mums much less now, the amount of sistas who asked me whether my woman was non-black, based on nothing other than the way I like to keep my place - TIDY. So believe me, money and financial independance has nothing to do with it, the sellouts are a lot closer to home.

Doing a job in Lloyds of London and see some African brothers and guess what job they are doing, using their hands to clean in between the grooves on the stairs of the escalators. I said man o man, that has to be the worst job on the planet....think the escalator mechanics had malfunctioned so they couldn't use the machine. Now growing up I promised myself I wouldn't be doing no sellout job like mini cabbing or security gurad work much less cleaning but you know what, in the context of what that pay does when money is sent back home, that job those brothers where doing is the best. I got speaking to them as I always do, they all come from Ghana and we had a good chat until we had to get back to our jobs.

So in your scenario, if someone 'sold out' to better their people, would it still be classed as selling out if the end game is something other than personal gain. A bit more extreme but likewise with the Jamaican dons, if they commit a murder here or there yet spread the fruits of their ill gotten gains amongst the starving in the ghetto, are they still sell outs.

So if this is not an understimation on your part then you make a good point in that it is all relative i.e. for the most part a sellout is simply a reflection of where your own mentality resides, your own level of consciousness, and you just need to look around to see where too many of ours is - most of the accusers are simply defending their own guilt trip.

BP - remember being questioned by a gro about my job. I was doing some work for one of the mobile phone providers at the time where I put it to the punk that he uses a mobile phone on a network by that same provider so who is the 'sellout'?


Even with unity their is disharmony but at least you know your reference point. There's too much verbal unity based on what bridge has already been crossed instead of which bridge should have been crossed. As long as our reference point is that as seen by the oppressor i.e. black skin then we're all coons....even if that's by association i.e. you're one because he's one.

Be interesting to here what some of those hip hop millionaires have to say about this.

I have to agree with this post. Many of the black people who have made something of themselves we insult. And this goes for black men and women. I admit that I have fallin into this at sometime. Example was footballer Jermaine Defoe or any other successful black figure and their choice in spouse. Which should never be put ahead of their accomplishments.