SNP’s word of the day: Blackgeoisie

Word: Blackgeoisie

Meaning: A “new” class of African Americans with money and “fashion power.” (Just typing this, I shuddered.)

Usage: “But if in 2012 the “black-geoisie” has integrated all the white codes, it does not [do so] literally. [There] is always a classic twist, with a bourgeois ethnic reference (a batik-printed turban/robe, a shell necklace, a ‘créole de rappeur’) that recalls the roots.” — a French Elle writer named Nathalie Dolivo in “Black Fashion Power”

You should know it because: Even for French fashion elitists (oui, the people who brought us Lara Stone in blackface and “slave earrings” as a hot Spring 2011 trend), this Elle piece is beyond the pale. It’s downright white supremacist. “Chic has become a plausible option for a community so far pegged to its codes of streetwear,” Dolivo writes, blithely flaunting her ignorance of American history. Um, what about the OGs in their oxfords and fedoras? What about ’70s collegiate-meets-Afro style? What about millennial dandies? Her point is too silly even to refute, yet too hateful to ignore. And “black-geoisie?!” This bloody woman finds the idea of stylish African Americans (e.g. the Obamas, whose names she repeatedly drags through her racist nescience) so utterly revelatory and unprecedented that it merits a neologism, one that’s nothing short of appalling. Dolivo’s career should meet its fate at the guillotine.

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