We are more than what we consume

BY GRACE ROLLINS

COURTESY 'THE NEW JOURNAL' A 1971 ad serves as a reminder of just how much Broadway has changed in the last three decades.

I've been astounded by the number of recent news stories and editorials that pore over every imaginable feature of Broadway redevelopment: the price per pound of Gourmet Heaven's classiness; the inexplicability of Whimsel's; the dirtiness of the floor of Krauszer's; the delayed opening of Urban Outfitters. While the debates and excitement over University Properties' manipulations have been going on since I've been here, these articles increasingly treat store openings and closings as defining moments on campus. These editorials give the impression that Yale's image is somehow predicated more on one strip of retail than on its embarrassing labor relations or under-par faculty hiring practices. These skewed priorities have cultivated in me a highly condescending attitude towards the uproar over how "nice" Broadway looks with its new additions—and exclusions.

When I saw the Angela Davis ad, though, I realized that, while I may mock this excitement, I also get worked up over the comings and goings on Broadway. I've felt surprisingly charged over how the street has been cleansed by Origins and ennobled by the Yale Bookstore. Oh great, I grumble, for God, for Capitalism, and for Yale, there's finally a place where upscale hipsters can stock up on commodified subculture and a place where some of the best-fed people on the planet can pay even more to feed themselves even better. I create my own fuss around University Properties' purification plan, the redevelopment that pushes undesirables back from Yale's borders, replacing former sites of diverse congregation with prettily packaged upscale consumption. Despite myself I join those who feel alienated by the corporate promenade (interspersed with mom-and-pops carefully disciplined by University Properties).

But after learning of a Broadway once radical enough to host an Angela Davis Bookstore, I ironically put myself in check. Sure, I would love to have a non-profit-black power-feminist-Marxist bookstore instead of Au Bon Pain and Gentry Heaven. Yet the idea of a consumer war pitting University Properties against radical philosophy was ludicrous to me. The counterculture nurtured by people like Angela Davis doesn't need legitimization by commodities.

My opposition to corporate invasion and retail gentrification was stemming from exactly the ideology I disdained: we are what we consume. Why is our identity so dependent on the names on these placards, the items in these shop windows? Why does our sense of cultural offense get so worked up over a handful of stores and restaurants? Instead of fighting battles over a few stupid consumer spaces, those of us who don't want our brains branded, who want an inclusive, authentic space for public interaction, should set an example by tuning ritualized consumption out of our self-image and focusing instead on other cultural spaces.

College life is a mecca of economically autonomous cultural spaces. With extracurriculars such a central part of our lives, Yalies, more than anyone, should be able to confirm that the uncommodified activity of artists, athletes, intellectuals, and friends can offer much more to our communities than the affirmation sought in consumption—even in places as "community-like" as the Daily Caffé used to be. Only by placing cultural weight on communities rather than commodities can we see that shiny stores are no shining path towards concrete improvement in New Haven's rundown neighborhoods. Defining ourselves and our culture as independent of consumption forces us to orient our priorities where they should be: towards revising our politics, ending social injustice, challenging destructive economies, and forcing powerful corporations like Yale to be accountable to places like New Haven through more than retail gentrification.

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