Question 1

What does “sellout” mean?

Accepted Answer

A Black person judged to have betrayed Black people to gain white approval, money, or position.

Question 2

Where does “sellout” come from?

Accepted Answer

American English has long used "sell out" for betraying any cause for gain, but Black American speech forged a specific, heavier instrument out of it: the verdict of racial betrayal. Randall Kennedy's book-length study, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (Pantheon, 2008), traces the rhetoric across centuries of real and alleged treachery — enslaved people who informed on planned rebellions, twentieth-century informants inside civil rights organizations and the Black Panthers — and the accusations aimed at prominent figures: Frederick Douglass attacked over his marriage to a white woman, W.E.B. Du Bois branded a "black Benedict Arnold" for his WWII-era patriotic stance. By the mid-twentieth century, literary historians note, the caricatured "Uncle Tom" had collapsed into a synonym for the racial sellout, and the Black Power era wielded both terms against establishment leaders, entertainers, and athletes. The label has since attached to figures from Clarence Thomas to Condoleezza Rice, and Kennedy's central observation stands: the word polices the boundary of racial loyalty, capable of both defending a besieged community and silencing dissent within it. It remains fully alive in Black political argument today.