The Deep Love and Human Reality Check of Ralph Lauren's Pink Pony Campaign

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi for Ralph Lauren’s Pink Pony Cancer Fund.

2020 marks the 20 years anniversary of Ralph Lauren’s Pink Pony Initiative. The designer launched the fund after the death from breast cancer at age 57 of Ralph Lauren’s close friend, Washington Post fashion editor Nina Hyde.

Lauren has focused, in particular ,on communities of color in his efforts to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, based on his keen awareness that these communities are most often underserved in access to quality health care. Teaming up with the world-renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Ralph Lauren opened a major cancer treatment center in Harlem. Since its founding in 2003, MSK Ralph Lauren Center (MSK RLC) “has cared for thousands of patients making it a beacon for accessible, compassionate cancer care for residents of Harlem and beyond,” writes the Ralph Lauren corporate communications office.

Honoring real progress made in the fight against cancer, Ralph Lauren’s Pink Pony launched this year a multilayered 360 marketing campaign titled “More Conversations, More Love”. The exciting initiative highlights a diverse and influential cast of cancer survivors, survivors and supporters — each of them individuals who have suffered personally with a cancer diagnosis and the friends and family members who have gone on the cancer journey with them.

Over 30 global personalities are participating including Director of the Boston University Antiracist Research Center and New York Times #1 bestselling author of How To Be An Antiracist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi; Black, queer, non-binary femme, sexuality educator Ericka Hart; former Maryland gubernatorial and Congressional candidate Maya Rockeymoore Cummings; environmental activist Nalleli Cobo; LGBTQ advocate Dr. Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins; and fivetime Olympic gold medalist Nathan Adrian. International personalities include Chinese singer and songwriter G.E.M., Korean actress and singer Krystal Jung, Australian singer and songwriter Delta Goodrem and British author Deborah James.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi for Ralph Lauren Pink Pony

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi for Ralph Lauren’s Pink Pony Cancer Fund

OMG! In AOC’s typical dig deeper fashion, I just researched Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s involvement in the Ralph Lauren Pink Pony project. I read Dr. Kendi’s book ‘How To Be an Antiracist’ at the height of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis this summer and was part of a book club discussing his work.

Dr. Kendi, age 38, is very recently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he is creating the Center for Antiracist Research. I was not prepared for what I just read at Ralph Lauren’s British website.

What has your personal cancer journey looked like?

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: I am the son of a woman who had breast cancer, and my wife also fought breast cancer when she was in her mid-30s. I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in January of 2018, and then I underwent six months of chemotherapy. I had surgery in August 2018. Luckily, I’ve been OK ever since. There was a time in which I didn’t think I would be here.

What life lessons have you learned from cancer—in retrospect, what do you draw from this experience?

IK: How critical it is to be a warrior. As we’re being warriors to fight racism in the body politic, and I’d spent years as a part of that larger battle against racism and sexism and homophobia and other forms of bigotry, and as we’re on the battlefield, we’re literally fighting for humanity. By the same token, we have our personal battles. We have to become personal warriors to fight for a human meaning ourselves. And, if you win that fight, to then hopefully turn around and fight for the lives of humanity.

In this very divisive time, how can we bring more people together to recognize that we are all part of the same family?

IK: I appreciate Pink Pony for driving home love because, in many ways, love is what’s going to save us. Love is a verb. Certainly, love saved me. My wife basically dragged me to get a colonoscopy completely against my will. I may not have gotten a colonoscopy until two months later because there was so much backlog. I can only imagine, I suspect, I wonder if there were other people who called around the same time I did who weren’t able to go to get a colonoscopy until two months later, and whether that two months became the difference between them living or dying. We don’t have a health care system that’s loving. We certainly have many doctors who aren’t empathetic with their patients and see them as the other, which is a problem. I recently read a piece that stated that we’re only spending 2.5 percent on public health. 2.5 percent. In a different type of world, it would be 50 or 75 percent. Can you imagine the number of diseases and the number of illnesses we would be able to reduce among all people?

Nina Luker for Ral Lauren Pink Pony

Division I athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nina Luker, 24, for Ralph Lauren Pink Pony Fund.

As a 23-year-old, Nina Luker, originally from Pennsylvania, was living in New York City with her roommate, Christina, and working in the advertising field. As a former Division I athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the last thing she imagined was the cancer diagnosis that would shake her world at 24. Six months ago, a few days before COVID hit, she was diagnosed with stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, from which she is now in remission.

Division I athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nina Luker, 24, for Ralph Lauren Pink Pony Fund.

And what about the other end of it. How do you feel about where you are now?

NL: There were moments in this entire journey that I doubted my mind and my body to get through this. I can confidently say, learning only a week ago that I’m in remission, that this mental battle is something that I have truly taken and put into my gratitude box. Never in my life had I fully trusted myself to get through something until this moment. I’ll never forget waking up in the morning after I received the good news that night. I had this overwhelming feeling of floating, like my body had lifted out of my bed, and I was free—this feeling of knowing that I’m in remission, and it’s a heavy word because it doesn’t mean I’m cancer-free. There’s still potential that I can get cancer and relapse, but at this moment, this was a win that I took.

As women we’re often very attached to our hair. Just like everything else life has handed you, you’ve been forced to let that go. What did you think when you looked in the mirror after your dad was done shaving your head?

NL: That was a moment I will never forget. I can still remember putting my hand on my hair, and it was a lot. I felt like a part of me had gone away because I didn’t have that hair, but then I also felt like this was the real me. I took down that veil of being someone and having this outward appearance. I was stripped back to my core. I’ll never forget my dad after he was done; he kissed the top of my head. It was a really special moment because I felt loved, I felt accepted.

To Be Continued . . . Ralph Lauren Pink Pony 20th Anniversary Campaign

Launched in September, the 2020 Pink Pony apparel collection is comprised of an assortment of updated Polo icons with fresh graphics and details, done in a clean palette of pink, navy, white, and grey. The “Love Language” tee takes center stage in the campaign and is available in 20 different languages. 100 percent of the purchase price from the sale of each light pink “Live Love” graphic tee and 25 percent of the purchase price from the sale of all other items in the Pink Pony Collection will be donated to the Pink Pony Fund of The Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation or to an international network of cancer charities.

AOC will continue covering the Ralph Lauren Pink Pony campaign in depth over this week. Lauren is typically modest about his efforts, but this Pink Pony reality check deserves much more exposure that it’s gotten in our COVID-infected, Trumpian world. It’s important to stress the fact that just as COVID-19 has hit communities of color harder than primarily white communities, cancer (and other diseases) takes the same higher toll in communities of color. In addition to the campaign itself, AOC will look for primary articles around the inequities in health care that exist in communities of color. It’s the least we can do to support Ralph Lauren’s 20th anniversary in the global fight against cancer.

Photographer Blair Getz Mezibov captures the Pink Pony Voices, with styling by Meryl Griffith.