For my loyal blog followers, it’s no surprise that my favorite weekend of the year is Harvard-Yale weekend. However, the Black Solidarity Conference weekend tightly holds second place. This past weekend was the 21st annual Black Solidarity Conference at Yale and our campus welcomed about 750 students from colleges and universities all across the country. Each year, the conference has a theme that guides the speakers we invite, the workshops we hold, and the panels we put together.This year’s theme was “The Miseducation: Changing History As We Know It,” so the conference focused on analyzing our collective past and highlighting ways in which Black histories have often been misconstrued. At the same time, a major part of the conference was also celebrating generations of untold Black histories and successes in several spheres. Some of my favorite events following this theme were a panel about the future of black people in STEM, a talk on policing and resistance by Professor Vesla Weaver, and a workshop on art activism featuring Chelsea Odufu.
These are just a few of the many topics and themes brought up during the conference, but are representative of the diversity of this year’s conference offerings. In between the aforementioned events we had Ujima groups, where attendees would have breakout discussions over lunch. That was a great time for a pretty general topic, such as being black in STEM, to take on several layers and nuances when discussed by students from different schools. I personally loved hearing about how the college campus culture greatly affects how students of color interact with these issues.
Aside from the thematic discussions and panels, the Black Solidarity Conference also has a major career development aspect to it. We have myriad corporate sponsors for the conference, including companies like Google, Mastercard, and Jopwell. All corporate sponsors were part of our career fair, where conference attendees got a chance to talk to company representatives and learn about internship and job opportunities.
Some companies even gave career talks, which gave attendees a chance to ask deeper questions about being a person of color in respective companies. This year, our partnership with Jopwell this year also extended to the first annual BSC+Jopwell essay contest. The prompt was, “Where have you been? Where are you going?” and five lucky BSC participants won $3,000 each from that contest!
On the last night of the conference is my favorite event, the Keynote Dinner at the Omni Hotel. All conference attendees dress in all black formal attire. That is to say, the dinner is one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve seen. The Keynote Speaker always relates his or her talks to the theme of the conference, but each comes from a very particular perspective colored by their field of profession. This year, we were lucky enough to have Professor Elizabeth Alexander, prolific poet, essayist, and professor. She spoke of solidarity as a generational endeavor and the ways that we can carry on the work of those before us. In the middle of her address, she had in interregnum at which point individuals were allowed to come to the mic, ask questions, and say what they need to do or learn to move forward. The entire experience was lyrical, moving, and cannot be done justice in my description.
Yours truly was on the Executive Board for this year’s Black Solidarity Conference, meaning I spent a lot of time this weekend helping to run events, making sure that everything was going smoothly, and directing conference attendees to locations of events. I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the most fun, motivated, and thoughtful people my age from all over the country. It’s never lost on me how rare of an opportunity this is; the Black Solidarity Conference at Yale is the largest conference of its kind. This may have been one of the busiest and most stressful weekends of my Yale experience, but it also most rewarding weekends of my Yale experience thus far. We began planning for this conference over the summer, and to see it unfolding so quickly and beautifully gave me unquantifiable pride.
