About.


PostBourgie is a running, semi-orderly conversation about race and gender and class and politics and media and whatever else we can think of. It represents the views of its authors and not those of their respective employers or organizations with which they are affiliated.

Holler: admin at postbourgie dot com | Facebook [1]  Twitter [2] +[3].

PostBourgie Banner by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.

PB is:

Angela | L.A. | D.C. | writer

belleisa | BK | Queens | publishing

blackink | Houston | Tampa | writer/journalist

Brokey McPoverty | Louisville | writer

feministtexican | Texas | education

G.D. | South Philly | BK | DC|  writer/journalist

Jamelle | VA | DC | journalism/public policy

Monica | Arkansas | DC | writer/journalist

Nicole| North Cackalack | D.C. | public policy

slb | B-more | writer/professor

VC | Washington State | BK | DJ

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The word ‘postbourgie’ was coined during a semi-serious conversation between a good friend and me. What prompted it? We’re not sure anymore. It may have come in the aftermath of Bill Cosby’s pound cake speech. Or maybe some overheated panel discussion condemning ‘coonery’ in the media. Or maybe some dude lamenting how black folks have fared since The Great Fall from the Unparalleled Golden Age of Upstanding Negritude.

Anyway, we were raising our eyebrows at something, ‘cuz well, that’s how we get down. We grew up in the hood (she in Brooklyn, me in South Philly), so the classism that animates so many conversations about the Myriad Ills of Black America always seemed to get our Spidey-senses tingling. We doled out impassioned eyerolls to the teachers who said we ‘spoke well.’  Ditto to the bourgie folks who got indignant about ‘ghetto names.’  And we didn’t do cotillions or frats or sororities.

But here we were as young adults —news junkies, hip-hop heads, smart-asses and autodidacts who grew up in the hood — suddenly smack dab in the middle class, wielding much of the same privilege we’d always criticized. Because of our backgrounds, we were keenly skeptical of the politics of respectability, and surrounded by and socializing with self-congratulating Negroes who patted each other on the back because they were about something and self-congratulating white folks who patted themselves on the back because they had black friends. (But damn it if we didn’t love the sushi!)

So where did we fit in?

We agreed that labels were silly and reductive. So, of course, we created one.

“We’re post-bourgie,” she said. Or I said. It doesn’t really matter. And we chuckled.

— G.D.

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