You Haven’t Earned The Right To Be A Basic B*tch Just Yet

No one wants to wear five dollar leggings and generic Uggs and spend three hours touching all the display cases at a Super Target more than I do right now. These characteristics are what one might call those of a “basic bitch”:

The basic bitch — as she’s sometimes called because it’s funnier when things alliterate, and because you’re considered a poor sport if you don’t find it funny — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings, her particularities vary by region and even neighborhood, but she is almost always portrayed as utterly besotted with Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to nearly every now-familiar punch line about a basic bitch, her love for the autumnal mass-market beverage. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are “mall.” They reveal a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet. (Noreen Malone, “What Do You Really Mean When You Say ‘Basic Bitch’?” (The Cut)

I have strong basic bitch tendencies. I embrace that. But, as a Black woman, I am not exactly what we mean when we refer to basic.

Definitionally “basic” is generally used to describe a white woman because the concept is built on a type of white woman performance.

Basic is about a kind of consumption. It is the mindless intake of tepid cultural tastes. Basic isn’t really about the Pumpkin Spice Latte or the cottagecore home design or the Hallmark Christmas movies. Those are just signifiers. Basic is about the cultural…