PostBourgie

PostBourgie is blog on race, culture, politics and media founded in 2007 by Gene Demby.

Demby founded PostBourgie in 2007. He had begun blogging a few years earlier, prompted by frustration with the state of media conversations about race. Speaking to Colorlines in 2012, Demby recalled in particular an occasion when a CNN reporter approached him on a basketball court to ask for comment on Bill Cosby's Pound Cake speech at the 2004 NAACP Image Awards. Demby said, "I pushed back on him pretty hard...There are people who think black people's condition in the world would be better if we just looked better. 'Pull up your pants.' It seemed so petty that we were having these conversations." In search of an alternative, Demby founded PostBougie as a group blog, inviting collaborators who shared his desire "to have conversations that assumed that black people were human beings who were complicated and imperfect, a space that wasn't super didactic."

Writing in The New Republic, Jamil Smith situates the origins of PostBourgie in a decade of outlets founded "[a]s the number of black journalists in newsrooms inched up in the 1990s, the number of formal race beats declined. Racial coverage began to migrate to media organizations and websites that covered it full time," including Colorlines, Racialicious and This Week in Blackness in addition to PostBourgie. Smith: "These sites don’t bring in corporate dollars like Vox or FiveThirtyEight, but they have survived and even thrived by concentrating their coverage on issues affecting people of color, and by providing opportunities for writers to write on these subjects with a frankness rarely seen in mainstream publications."

The PostBourgie blog operates as a "volunteer effort."

PostBourgie has drawn notice for its commentary on topics including television, film, music and language, gentrification, hair politics, and race and violence.

Speaking to New York Magazine, Jamil Smith cited PostBourgie as one of the blogs that "really set the bar for...spaces that were made available to [African-Americans and other people of color]. Even if you were working for traditional media, you didn’t have the opportunity to offer your perspective, to tell the unvarnished version of the truth that you see every day...it really hearkens back to the tradition of the black press."

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