Whether they're injecting facts to conversations ("Speaking of Obama's speech on ISIS, did you know 'Malia' is a Hawaii name meaning 'calm and peaceful'?"), providing obscure tidbits ("I know everyone loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but Jason Segel's best role was in Bye Bye Benjamin"), using smart sounding words ("That trope harkens back to a deconstructionist narrative") or making analogies ("Ray J is the Derrick Rose of reality TV"), Bougie Black People relish opportunities to show everyone exactly how educated they are.
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This is done for two reasons:
1. Education is a Bougie Black status marker, no different than an Uber account or an awkward selfie on a mountain bike trail, and proving that they're educated allows them to self-identify. If they're ever in a new environment and immediately need to know who the other Bougie Black People are, all they'll have to do is notice the person who segues a conversation about pizza into an "unpacking of the racialized history behind the gluten-free movement."
2. They spent — and still owe — $750,000 for the education that enabled them to become the Assistant Deputy to the Deputy of Deputy Operations, so they still feel a need to apply everything learned in each of the seven African-American studies electives they took.
Still, Bougie Black People are aware that outward attempts to prove their knowledge can be obnoxious. Rude, even. So, they've embraced the thinkpiece and have allowed it to be both a vessel and a proxy for their smartness.
The thinkpiece — when a writer spends several hundred words articulating a smart-sounding angle on either a topic everyone is talking about or a topic no one has ever talked about — only ranks behind "the bottomless mimosa" and "Melissa Harris-Perry" when listing inventions most crucial to Bougie Black life, as it gives them four different ways to show everyone how smart they are. They can write one, comment on one, reference one in a regular conversation ("Did you read Coates' piece on croissants this morning?"), and even just post one on their Facebook page under the status "Exactly!"
Also, because most Bougie Black People have "jobs" but don't actually "do much of anything at work," the thinkpiece and the thinkpiece farms they sprout from keep them occupied during the day. Which is great for everyone, because you can't have a bunch of unoccupied Bougie Black People running around all day. Someone might get hurt.
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