I thought it was always a meme.

It was never really a thing, it was a meme

It has never been a thing. It was a thing among twelve or thirteen black people with postgraduate degrees for a few hours, decades ago, like a lot of other “Afrocentric” fads, such as giving kids from Massachusetts made-up Swahili names, wearing dashikis while teaching sociology to white kids, and moving to Liberia.

There are probably still a few old people trying to celebrate it, while their grandchildren laugh at them. I’ve seen paraphernalia for sale, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone IRL who actually celebrates it, and I was raised by and among college professors, some of whom bragged about how radical they’d been in the 70s.