his photo may be found here http://www.wp.frasernet.org/ .
His organization has the following noble goals in mind:
He has a lot of black faces on the website, including some of his “wealth coaches”. But, thing is, would he himself qualify at least as high yellow? Or is he a white guy who should do a better job playing reverse Michael Jackson, like maybe get some minstrel blackface cosmetics?
“High yellow”? Has that come back into fashion over there? 
I’ve never heard of him before but the wording on that page would never entice me to do business with them. (In the sense of it sounding like someone trying to sound really intelligent and knowing).
no idea, but that’s what you get when you force high school students to read Tony Morrison.
What do you think is the right way of calling people of that skin color? “I can’t believe I am still counted as minority for quota purposes”?
He looks hispanic or partially black, very low percentage [what may have once been considered octaroon]
Something in his face structure and hair just screams cuban actually. He looks just like the father of a cuban friend from my last job.
Hee!
Dunno. But I don’t recall hearing anyone saying that since the antebellum days. (Yes, I’m pretty old, ya know.)
Just looking at that picture, I’d have *guessed *him of Central or South American descent. But I know nothing of his background - socially or genetically. Genes for skin color get all muddled up pretty early on in the mixing, and genes for facial features we commonly associate with Black (wide nose, thick lips) aren’t found in all people of African ancestry even if they do have dark brown skin, so sure, if he says he’s Black, I’ll accept it.
I mean honestly, if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t guess Lena Hornewas Black, either.
Trying to determine people’s heritage based on physical appearance is sheer idiocy.
Got anything else?
I was trying to think of a nice way of saying this, but… yeah. Who are we to judge how someone chooses to self-identify?
Trying to determine how they’re treated by police, on the other hand…
In short, he would never be guilty of driving while black. Maybe driving while Hispanic in any of the regions where that’s a problem.
he is not a someone. He is a conman running an affinity fraud targeting American blacks. But he is either too dumb or too wise to bother with using a more black-looking guy as the front for the operation. Either his marks will eat it up, or else he is too clueless to realize otherwise.
Then again, that’s all small potatoes. The truly scary part is this “what if his website accurately reflects the thinking style, so to speak, of his intended audience of black businessmen and businessman-wannabes?” Because he does not seem to be aiming at the social workers from da hood here - it’s more like the middle class and upper middle class segments.
If the president of Detroit school board is incapable of writing a coherent email, that’s just one guy in the worst hellhole of them all. But Mr. Fraser’s writings, if he is as successful at what he is doing as he claims (what with the claimed media appearances and so on) give us a much a broader snapshot of how the “elite” of the black America see the world around them.
He looks like Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind.
Looks black enough to me. That is, he looks like a person of at least some African descent. I didn’t read his site, so I don’t know if he’s a con man, but I’ve met a fair number of people over my lifetime that look like him, including some of my relatives and friends of the family, all of whom identified as black.
He looks black to me, so I have no idea what you’re babbling on about.
You have evidence that he’s defrauding people? You seem to be drawing a lot of conclusions from very limited information.
I don’t find much of what he says on that site especially compelling, but to me it looks like little more than a marketing and networking site, not much different from the dozens or hundreds of other services out there designed to capitalize on the endless business and entrepreneurial obsession with self-promotion and making contacts among people who might be able to help your career and your financial success.
Here’s a short piece from Ebony magazine a few years ago, which says that Fraser “changed the face of networking in the African-American community in the 1990s with the publication of Success Runs in Our Race: The Complete Guide to Effective Networking in the Black Community.”
Here’s an advertisement from two years ago for a National Professional Network leadership summit at sea. It’s no different from dozens of other networking and marketing and entrepreneurial and self-help types of conferences, as far as i can tell.
A Lexis/Nexis search also found articles like this:
and
As i suggested above, most of this sounds like the usual nebulous marketing and networking mumbo-jumbo to me. I tend to see the whole industry as a rather content-free environment, designed more to rev people up and make them feel good about themselves than about teaching any really useful skills. But i don’t see anything particularly unusual or offensive about Fraser, and it could well be that he does actually help his target audience with the sort of networking advice that they feel they need in their careers and their lives.
Again, you’re drawing pretty big conclusions from almost no evidence.
Here is an article from The Crisis, another black magazine (originally founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP), talking about how Fraser was behind an organization designed to help young athletes negotiate the pressures of professional sports and make informed decisions about their futures. I don’t know how successful this organization was or is, and i guess it’s possible that it was just another attempt to reach into the pockets of well-paid athletes in return for providing them a service that they don’t need, but if the aims of the organization as expressed in the article are fulfilled, i think it could be a valuable resource.
Anyway, as far as i can tell, about the only thing that distinguishes this from dozens of similar networking and marketing people is that the intended audience is black, and that the guy running it is black. Or, at least, “high yellow.” :rolleyes:
There are several youtube videos of him you could easily have consulted. He sounds black, his facial features are black, he looks like a light skinned black man, he is addressing a black audience about black economic empowerment, at what point is he going to be black enough to you?
mhendo, thanks for bringing up the evidence of Mr. Fraser’s success in his field of endeavor.
That just goes to confirm what I wrote in my previous post - that black middle and upper middle class do indeed respond very favorably to the sort of rhetoric that I can see at his site.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to build intergenerational wealth, put God first, save black boys and achieve “25% Annual Decrease in Purchasing From Companies That Do Not Support Us”. Way to go, Fraser and his followers.
The OP reminds me of the attitude I find in a lot of lower-middle-class whites here in Middle Georgia; they don’t mind living **with **blacks but they don’t want to live beneath them. Black people who do better financially than these white people often earn the moniker ‘uppity’. “It’s not that I don’t like him, he just thinks a lot of himself.”, they say, w/ that looks that asks my white face to agree.
So when a black man has a measure of success and tries to share it, I’m not shocked the OP comes along to denigrate him, his success, the ideas behind it and the potential audience for it. Mr. George Fraser deserves better than this.
code grey asks, ‘What do you think is the right way of calling people of that skin color?’ If I were addressing him instead of ridiculing him, I’d start with, “Sir.”
Calling someone a “high yellow” “con man” doesn’t belong in MPSIMS. Not sure where it does belong. Let’s see how it does in the Pit.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator