BY YOSHI JOHNSON

In print | April 3, 2008

In March, I attended the annual Black Solidarity Conference at Yale. Our contingent of fourteen Swarthmore students, mostly younger than I, eagerly anticipated meeting and picking the brains of other young black leaders from across the country. I myself even had a bit of measured optimism about the possibilities of the weekend, although I’d been disappointed by such self-proclaimed ‘powerhouse conferences’ before. Still, this conference was at Yale, so the expectation was that the attendees would demonstrate some semblance of intelligent, articulate politics around blackness and black people. If nothing else came out of it, at least I could be inspired to greater heights by driven, community-oriented peers, and at the very least, we were getting off campus for the weekend. That fact alone had my hopes high, so that the prospect of a few days steeped in the spirit of black solidarity seemed promising.

Unfortunately, Yale’s conference was a total bust. I went because I felt strongly rooted in my community and the need for social justice, and I was looking for inspiration and hope to continue doing the work. I thought that I might discover a vibrant, diverse group of leaders, a burgeoning social movement in its thrilling early stages. I should have known, however, that Yale was not the place to find such things. I mean, the conference’s headlining event was Lupe Fiasco, after all — a skilled, relatively principled hip hop artist, but certainly no revolutionary. The weekend’s primary corporate sponsor was none other than Abercrombie & Fitch, for crying out loud. In fact, I have a conference booklet plastered with a gratuitous A&F ad to prove it, and a courtesy A&F-branded daypack by which to remember the whole weekend.

Yeah, uh huh. Abercrombie & Fitch. The company that was successfully sued not once, not twice, but three times because it hired pretty white people to work in the front of its stores and pretty brown people to lift boxes and stock in the back. Of course, I lodged a complaint with the Steering Committee on the spot, since it failed to disclaim in either spoken or written word that the corporate sponsors that made the weekend possible did not respect and honor our community. I explained that by taking the money with no questions asked—all I was asking for was a qualifying statement of some sort!—they had absolved Abercrombie of its sins and any obligation to work further for the trust and confidence of black communities in specific, and people of color more generally. What’s perhaps worst of all is the utter indifference with which the organizers, and indeed, most of the conference goers, received this perplexing fact.

Needless to say, I was disappointed by the conference; its examination of issues around blackness was disengaged and woefully uncritical. They basically brought us together to march rank-and-file with them, towing party line of “Vote Obama in November” (we’ll leave that one alone for now), and the flippant and apathetic attitude in the air was disturbing. You could almost hear people’s innermost thoughts: ‘I wonder if I can put this on my resume…’ These kids, knee-deep in social privilege and caught up in the rat race, seemed to have lost sight of the bigger picture.

After a narrowly defined civil rights agenda was realized in the 1960s, bringing blacks into a mainstream society still ill-suited to equitably and justly receive them did little to alter the racist realities of the American system. A legalistic framework now neutral on its face still begets realities of discrimination, though now the beast has transformed itself. There may be the Oprahs and P. Diddys - and yes, the Swatties, Amherstians and Elies - but this limited phenomenon is really just the same old America dressed up in the unconvincing trappings of racial and socioeconomic equality. Against this backdrop, an Abercrombie-sponsored apathy towards a community’s grand problems and narrative on the part of an elite few individual only serves to further frustrate an equality that can be enjoyed by all.

Racism is alive and well in this society; its effects, however, are felt and observed unevenly and disproportionately — and evidently, not so urgently by the black folk at Yale. Given that newer generations of blacks seem ill-advised of their role in the grander scheme of events, the contention that the our ‘powerhouse’ generation is in fact ill-equipped to continue the struggle we’ve inherited is entirely founded. Perhaps, then, we should hit the books a bit more before undertaking a conference entitled “Revitalizing the Revolution,” because we have to start a revolution properly first. How? Well, I don’t know, but here’s a tip, kiddos: The revolution will not be sponsored by Abercrombie & Fitch.

Yoshi is a senior. He can be reached at ajohnso1@swarthmore.edu.

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