[SoTrue1920]

Is a non-black person who joins an NPHC organization a "sell-out"?

I'm not being facetious.

See, I've been called a sell-out my entire life. I dared to have friends of all races in high school. When some of those friends and I ended up at the same college, I went through NPC rush as a freshman, thinking it would be cool to be in the same org. as one of my closest friends (who later became a member of Zeta Tau Alpha). Of course, that was not to be, because at the time, none of the NPC sororities at my alma mater had accepted any African American members.

I like rock music better than hip-hop, always have, and probably always will. When I went to college, I decided to become involved with the student-run radio station. I'd listened to it growing up, so it was a dream job for me. When I rose up through the ranks into station management, the African American students who worked at other student organizations called me "sell out" and "oreo cookie" simply because I dared to do something that they hadn't tried or hadn't been able to do in their own attempts. When I became the general manager of the station, these same fools who called me "sell out" and "oreo cookie" came to me looking for jobs. If I'd given my detractors position at the station, would that have made me less of a sell-out? What about the fact that when I was in a position to hire volunteers, I hired more non-white students than anyone had in the history of that radio station?

When members of Pi Kappa Alpha scrawled "n*ggers enter" on a garbage can and put it outside the Kappa Sigma suite to protest Kappa Sig's acceptance of a black pledge, does the fact that I helped organize a student protest against the PiKes make me less of a sell-out? What about the end result of the demonstration -- the university was shut down for three days, and gained an African American Studies department (one of our many demands)? Am I more black now?

I think that term "sell-out" is quite possibly a defensive mechanism used by some folks to explain why it's easier for some African Americans to move through racially mixed circles than it is for themselves. Even if that's not true in your case, ChaosDST, I can't understand why in this day and age we are so hung up on there being one true, authentic way to express Blackness in our society. There are as many different ways to be black as there are Black folks on the planet. No one's cornered the market on it, and essentialist actions like calling someone a "sell-out" only helps to perpetuate the continued intra-racial distrust, misunderstanding, and dysfunction in our communities.

Just my $19.20.