Thoughts from the Black Solidarity Conference

What I scribbled down during two particularly hard to sit through panels:
I hate when ppl interchange race and culture. Blackness in this country is inherently multicultural. Some of us were not raised by black communities. A growing percentage of Caribbean or African individuals are grouped with multigenerational African-Americans, and how does that interact with culture? Their culture is linguistic, is international, is full of persons who look and sound and think like them. They are from somewhere they don't want to lose. I can only trace my family back as far as Savannah, Georgia. What does that do to black "culture"? How do we cross those ties to present a unified front, and do we even want to? I like rock better than hip-hop, under most circumstances. I did not know what it meant to dream of fish. My blackness is an identity, but rarely stems from a cultural framework.

 [later]

 I don't know why I keep coming to this conference. I can't reconcile my conflicting understandings of what solidarity amongst black peoples with my own personal strivings and the characteristics of my soul. I go to these lectures and participate in these discussions, but I...I never feel like they're talking to/about me. I don't like saying this; in fact, it hurts me to say this, but I don't really feel "black enough" to be here--not by the normative (and frankly, quite stereotypical) definition of blackness being presented. So many people equate race with culture, race with class, race with mindsets, race with academic interests...black peoples are amongst the most multifaceted, diverse peoples on the face of the planet. There is no way to group multigenerational (my-ancestors-were-slaves-and-slavemasters-on-both-sides-of-my-family) black Americans with recent African- or Caribbean immigrants from a cultural perspective; there is increasingly little room to group even MAAs by culture when you factor in things like class and educational attainment. You are isolating huge pockets of black peoples by equating blackness with hip-hop or the South or underclass values. You are dividing us by talking about giving back to the black communities we came from, because we do not all come from such communities. Sometimes I feel like, while I identify as a black person, not all black people would even consider identifying with me, because through multigenerational oppression and internalization of racist interpretations, the masses of black peoples have stopped associating blackness with school, with the Ivy League, with graduate education, with the academy and the professoriate class. I'm rambling here, but what I'm trying to say is sometimes groups of black people make me feel like as much of an outsider--if not more--than people I'm supposedly not supposed to have anything in common with. Princeton is my first black community. How does that let me fit into "solidarity"? Why does being here make me wonder what the fuck I'm doing here? How can we celebrate diversity in solidarity--the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim says that social solidarity, in an organic and productive sense, can arise only out of diversity--painting a monotone portrait of black collegiate America as is presented at this conference does violence to the concept of solidarity. It makes me feel nothing but excluded, and even worse, it makes me think that whoever is in charge of our togetherness hasn't even considered me.