Atlanta Rapper Salute Shakes up the Black Community with "Plantation Mentality" Single and Video

Atlanta, GA - February 26, 2019 As a Black person, have you ever experienced colorism from another Black person? Have you ever experienced another Black person trying to flex their social status on you and in front of white people or those whom they automatically assume have a higher social status than you? 

Some Black people attribute this behavior to something called a “plantation mentality.” We’ve all heard stories about how due to house slaves having lighter skin, they seemingly had it easier than the slaves that worked the fields. We now know that this is not true as these people had their own carousel of horrors to endure. 

Still, in 2019, some Black people will subconsciously use this ideology as a tool to keep their own people financially, socially, psychologically and spiritually enslaved. With his new “Plantation Mentality” visual, Atlanta rapper @SaluteCUG is challenging the Black community to question why we are still operating with a “#plantationmentality.”

The video opens with @SaluteCUG dressed as a beggar who walks up to a well-to-do Black man who is walking to his Camaro. Salute asks the man for spare change, but what he got was a “No” sprinkled with some talk about how he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in if he’d stop sinning. He must have forgot that the latter part of John 8:7 says, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” Throughout the visual, Salute begins to rap about breaking the cycle of this type of destructive behavior in the Black community. He also proposes a few solutions to shifting forward so that we can move as the powerful, Black unit that we were created to be. 

@SaluteCUG is an Alabama native and served eight years in the United States Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since returning from the military, Salute works with his organization “Salute Our Troops” in which he helps veterans re-acclimate and rehabilitate after serving in the military.