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To be Black in Martha’s Vineyard in August is momentous. The first week of the month, folks ferry in for Legacy Week — which honors Historically Black Colleges and Universities — and the African American Film Festival in the historically Black neighborhood of Oak Bluffs. Two blocks away from Inkwell Beach, Oak Bluffs’ waterfront, sits Nashawena Avenue, where Jane C. Edmonds — a civil rights leader and owner of two homes on the street — lives in a 10 bedroom house. In 1966, when she was just 19, her mother hired the island’s only Black realtor to purchase a shanty home that peered over the water for just $3,000. “My mother looked at the property with the water view and instantly said, ‘I’m buying that house,’ and paid for it in cash,” says Edmond. “She said to me, ‘You’ll be glad I did this someday.’” Today, that home, along with the house she currently lives in nearby, are together worth close to $5 million. It’s a legacy Edmonds’ plans to keep within her family — a shared sentiment amongst the Black folks in the area, which is what first built Oak Bluffs reputation as a Black haven. “It’s a magical place,” Edmonds tells me, as we head to breakfast in her grey BMW convertible. As we approach Circuit Ave., a street home to Black-owned shops like the famed gift shop C’est La Vie, we pass Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Otis Moss III, walking down the street. “You can run into anyone,” she says.
Oak Bluffs dates back to the 19th century, as one of the only areas in New England where Black folks could vacation with dignity. With visitors from Martin Luther King to the Obamas, it gained a reputation as a place for the affluent middle to upper class. This past July, to honor the legacy of Black residents of the area, Ralph Lauren introduced their new campaign, an Oak Bluffs beach-themed collection designed in collaboration with Morehouse and Spelman colleges. The campaign, released just ahead of Legacy Week, was led by creative director James Jeter. In it, captivating images showed Black kids in preppy and collegiate wear, lounging on the porches of million-dollar waterfront homes, overlooking Inkwell Beach. On July 23, they presented a short documentary, A Portrait of The American Dream: Oak Bluffs, directed by Cole Brown, showcasing Oak Bluffs Black history as well as the limited collection.
Across social media, many users — both who frequented the island or aspired to — praised the campaign for its positive representation of Black life and history. Others accused the brand of catering to Black elitism, erasing the varied experiences of Black Americans involvement with the Ralph Lauren brand. Black liberation and elitism has been debated since the days ofW.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. But now, off the heels of the Met Gala’s latest theme—”Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” — and shows like HBO’s The Gilded Age, which explores stories of affluent Black families in the 19th Century, there’s increased interest in untold stories of the Black elite. Yet in a time when political conservatism is increasing, are campaigns like Ralph Lauren’s emblematic of Black American life and aspirations? Or are they reinforcing a class-based divide within Black communities?
Part of the issue that critics have is the history of the brand. At the end of July, following the release of the campaign, DJ and curator Alexander Cobb, 35, kicked off the conversation on TikTok: “I do not want a Black all-American story when it comes to Polo Ralph Lauren because that is not how people who look like me have engaged with Polo Ralph Lauren,” he said. “It’s never been about some elite bourgeois shit. We stole that shit.” Growing up in Houston — inspired by Texas artists like Pimp C who rapped “Polo horses on my bed, fuck Hilfiger” —Cobb had a different relationship to Polo. “I think the Oak Bluffs story is dope but I had a problem with Ralph Lauren telling that story because the brand has a lot to do with Americana and that looks different for us,” he tells Rolling Stone. For those in his area, their connection with the brand came from discount stores like Ross and Marshalls. “We were discriminated against in the early 2000s going to clubs, Ralph Lauren was the clothes we were wearing to get in.”
The relationship that Black Americans have to the Ralph Lauren’s brand depends where you live and how much money you have. Brooklyn’s Lo Life crew, for example, was known for shoplifting Ralph Lauren in the Eighties as a means of protest. “Growing up in the ghetto,” Rack-Lo, its founder, once said, ”the clothing inspired us that there was more to life. It inspired us to be a part of the rich and elite and acquire the American Dream.” Those who purchased their Ralph Lauren by way of its official store, on the other hand, felt the new campaign was a positive representation of their lives, where struggle and adversity weren’t at the center. “I feel like this side of the Black experience doesn’t get enough attention,” says Carlysle McNaught, who counteracted Cobb’s take on Ralph Lauren via TikTok. “[The media] just further builds into these negative stereotypes.”
It’s true that Jeter’s Oak Bluffs campaign highlights an often overlooked story of Black affluent life, also recently seen in The Gilded Age, which depicts elite Black communities in the Northeast in the 19th Century as railroad construction took off. A century and a half later, now in a tech-era, Black folks are still coming to terms with what “elite” means to them. “The Black elite is about self definition,” says Carla Peterson, author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Her family was an inspiration behind the family of The Gilded Age’s upper-crust Black lead, Peggy Scott. “The Black elite is the old elite my parents were a part of. There’s gatekeeping and policing of borders which we see in Phylicia Rashad’s character [Elizabeth Kirkland]. That was about respectability and good character and pedigree, high culture and social belonging. It creates a society that brings pleasure but the exclusion can be hurtful.”
When Jeter publicly presented the Ralph Lauren campaign on Martha’s Vineyard, he and panelists engaged in a discussion, describing the campaign as “elite,” but not “elitist.” David Rice, a Morehouse psychology professor and advisor to the brand, posed a question: “What does it mean to be elitist and separate ourselves from others? That’s something for us to pay attention to as we are in these privileged spaces, what are our responsibilities?” Speaking with Rolling Stone, he explains that the discourse was part of the point. “I don’t represent Ralph Lauren, but I don’t see them as needing to be responsible or responsive to the critique,” Rice says. “This narrative and discourse is about looking at Oak Bluffs, this very privileged space, through the eyes of two historically Black colleges and that’s a perspective. In many instances, there’s legitimate critique and it was anticipated. The idea was to spark conversation.”
In recent years, Black wealth has increased, but studies show that only 4.7 percent out of 13.6 percent of Black folks maintain it. “The way I view elitism isn’t excluding people but opening the door for people of color,” says Christy Batantou. “We live in a capitalistic society and with this collection, people feel left out and that this life isn’t attainable but I see it as inspiring.” Yet, despite the wealth misdistributions, Black consumer power is expanding. “My critique is not on the Ralph Lauren brand but on understanding our relationship to capitalism and consumerism,” says Dr. Taylor Cummings, an educational psychologist. “The way that Black folks have historically conceptualized luxury is deeply tied to whiteness and systems of power and domination. You can’t be free in a system of capitalism.”
My visit to Oak Bluffs is friendly. Everyone smiles with familiarity despite us being strangers. I run into a former classmate from my HBCU alma mater, North Carolina A&T and see Black celebrities like Greenleaf’s Keith David taking a seat at Nancy’s Restaurant. Tabitha Brown’s daughter, Choyce, is walking freely down Lake Ave., and Michelle Obama is hosting an event days later. It is a different kind of safety, one that’s I’ve rarely felt since my years at A&T. However, elitism rears its head. In conversations, people make the case for Oak Bluffs and the campaign, thankful it shows “Black excellence,” and not “ghetto behavior.” One woman vacationing tells me that the area “is good for white folks, because the media presentation of us is so ratchet, raggedy, and singular in entertainment.”
There’s pride in Black spaces and the safety and success they bring. Our stories are varied and vast and a deep dive into one does not discredit the other. Yet the work to distance oneself from our societal struggle, to show success, still indicates struggle. Black culture has always made lemonade from its lemons. But what else is there to do when that’s your only ingredient? “Two things can be true,” says Cobb. “You can be autonomous [and] move in community. Black people are not a monolith but our liberation has to be monolithic in order for us all to be free.”
