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What Is A Bougie Buffer? 3 Things To Know About The Concept Of The Buffer Class

What Is A Bougie Buffer? 3 Things To Know About The Concept Of The Buffer Class

bougie
What Is A Bougie Buffer? 3 Things To Know About The Concept Of The Buffer Class What Is A Bougie Buffer? 3 Things To Know About The Concept Of The Buffer Class. Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs speaks at the Sacramento Press Club, July 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)/Photo: San Francisco Mayor London Breed is inaugurated on July 11, 2018, in San Francisco./Rep. Gregory Meeks, (D-N.Y.) (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)/A fly lands on former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s face at the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 20, 2020. (Democratic National Convention via AP)

“Bougie” today is not your grandmother’s bougie. The word is being used as political slang, popping up all over social media and it has a new meaning. 

In the past, Black people used it to describe a person who was acting better than everyone else. “She’s so bougie,” for example, might have been used to describe a woman acting snobby and showing off her material wealth — a shortened version of bourgeois.

The word “bourgeois” was popularized by the social critic and theorist Karl Marx. In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that worked for the preservation of capitalism to ensure their own economic supremacy in society.

“The widespread use of ‘bougie’ these days has sparked a debate about appropriation. But it’s complicated, as are its connotations,” USA Today reported. 

Add the word “buffer” to “bougie” and you have a person who is blocking the needs of an entire group to keep his or her own place in society.

Sociology Professor Aaron Gullickson wrote about the role of “the mixed‐race category as either a ‘buffer class’ or a status threat” in the American Journal of Sociology. His article was entitled “Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880.”

“The role of the mixed‐race category as either a ‘buffer class’ or a status threat depended on the class composition of whites,” Gullickson wrote. “Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest where whites had high occupational prestige and thus little to fear from a mulatto group.”

Here are three things to know about the concept of the buffer class.

1. Protector of the status quo and corporate confederacy, buffer between elites and Black America

Under one theory, a bougie is Black person who is being used politically to undermine the demands of the overall Black community. Rather than fight for increased rights for Black America, he or she works to maintain the status quo.

The Moguldom Nation founder Jamarlin Martin provided this definition of a “bougie buffer”:

“A bougie buffer is a Black or racially-mixed Black bourgeoisie who is in conflicted partnership with the white power structure,” Martin said. “Bougie buffers have an orientation to defend the status-quo and preach pragmatism while acquiring financial and political currencies from the white power structure.

“Generally, white Democrats and the corporate confederacy use bougie buffers to politically pacify Black America and de-risk racial rebellions. Bougie buffers generally favor diversity and symbolism over defending and prioritizing the Black poor, structurally.”

2. Party loyalty

Bougie buffers aren’t open to shaking things up, especially politically. While there have been a growing number of people from Cornel West and Robert Johnson to Diddy calling for a new political party to be formed — one that would push a Black agenda — bougie buffers tend to stick to the DNC. 

“Bougie buffers are usually institutionalized into the Democratic Party and believe that to be Black, you have to pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party before freedom, justice, equality, before truth, principles and God,” Martin said. “Buffers are highly motivated by money and traffic in the race for financial gain, without strong conviction in the rise of Black America. Buffers only believe in taking risks in business and entrepreneurship, not the politics of Black America. They are extremely risk-averse about changing existing racial hierarchies.”

3. Neutralizing the Black vote

It’s a Democratic Party strategy to use a “buffer” class to eliminate the power of the Black vote, according to Jason Black aka The Black Authority.

There has been an “ethnic cleansing strategy six decades in the making,” Black said on a YouTube video. “The (Democratic) strategy is, use the buffer classes. The buffer class is anybody that is not a Black person who is demanding the obliteration of white supremacy.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

According to The Black Authority, the buffer class is comprised of “non-white people, Latinos, Asians, Arabs. East Indians, LGBT, Bi-racials….they (Democrats) want to fix them together to neutralize the Black vote.”

The sole purpose of the buffer class is to supplant the Black vote “so Democrats don’t have address Black America’s demands such as issues as reparations,” Black added.

Minister Louis Farrakhan suggested there was a buffer class in his speech on the 12th Anniversary of the Million Man March, delivered at the Atlanta Civic Center on Oct. 16, 2007. This is an excerpt from that speech, as reported by Final Call.

“Now, let’s look at the wealthy and the famous among us. They have become a buffer between the angry Black masses and white people of power and influence that have us looking at our own rich as though they have betrayed us, when the wise demons behind them have used them as a buffer to protect them from the anger of the poor white, the poor Black and the poor brown.

“That is why you can never be an effective spokesperson for the hurt of your people because if you displease the crab barrel master, you are afraid that he might put you back in the barrel and not pluck you out again. But God took me out of the barrel. I don’t owe nothing to no master! I owe it all to God! And God will take us all out of the barrel and He will never take one out and not show the others that He can get them out too.”