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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 4, 2002)
January 4*2002* BOOKS t’s good to he Rebecca Walker. The writer, lecturer and founder of Third Wave Direct Action Q irp.— a national nonprofit devoted to young women’s leadership and activism— has been named by Time magazine as one of 50 future leaders younger than 40. She is entering the sixth year of her relationship with music powerhouse Meshell Ndegeocello, greatly enjoying parenting their 12-year old son and working on two book projects. But the 32-year- old’s successes have followed years of painful struggle and confusion. Walker’s htxik Black White and Jewish: Auto - biography of a Shifting Self, just released in paperback, is part diary, part confession and part exploration of her multiple— and cultural ly opposed— identities. It begins with her birth in 1969 Mississippi to famed African American author Alice Walker and white, Jewish civil rights worker Mel Leventhal. She describes herself as “a movement child,” brought forth in a period of sexual and racial revolution. “My parents break all the rules,” Walker writes, “and marry against laws that say they can’t.... They say that love is the tie that hinds, and not blood.” Although true for her young parents, Walker feels a profound separation between family members— a separation that works to define her feelings and actions up into her adult life. Relocating to Brooklyn as a child, she describes a normal, middle-class house hold and ironically insists “I am not tragic" while illus trating how each side of her family subtly excludes the other. Her father’s family remains uncharted ground for her mother during the entire course of the marriage: “ I imagine that if my mother were there she would he unbearably sensitive, masked, edgy. It would he too stressful for her to sit and pretend that she felt...like any other family member. As if race, and hers in particular, was not an issue. That it is an issue is undeniable, her absence confirms it, and I am far from oblivious.” And the alienation works both ways. Visiting her mother’s family in the south, Walker learns the word “cracker" and exclaims: “1 have some thing inside of me I know they hate.... How do I reconcile my love for my uncles and cousins with the fact that I remind them of pain?” The young Walker responds not by recon I All m ixed u p Rebecca Walker talks about remains.... Reconnecting 10 and 15 years later and finding that the love is still there only reinforces what I already believe: that love itself is eter nal and that people are drawn together for reasons we cannot understand. I have had many important discussions with all members of my family since writing the book. I feel that my family now truly knows what my experi ence was growing up, so I am known to them now in a more complete way. It hasn’t been easy...but it has been good. I think we are all closer now, and that our relationships are more real. the difficulty of multiple identities by L isa B radshaw ciling hut by holding herself hack emotionally, unable “to love my family members un reservedly... unable to commit to fully being there.” The confusion and separation of identities increase when Walker’s parents divorce and move to opposite ends of the country— her mother settles in San Francisco and her father in Washington, D.C. The estranged partners decide their daughter will spend two years with each of them alternately, a decision that has a profoundly negative impact on her. “My father,” she explains, “returns to the life that was expected of him, marrying a nice Jewish girl...my mother falls for...an old sweet heart from her Spelman days. For them there is a return to what is familiar.” On the other hand, for Walker “there is a turning away from all of those things...as I move from place to place, from Jewish to black...from status quo middle class to radical artist bohemia, it is less like jumping from station to station on the same radio dial and more like moving from planet to planet.” Walker finds that in the Washington suburbs she is not “white enough" and that in San Francisco she is not “black enough.” She quickly learns the vocabulary of racism— whites find her “ intimidating,” blacks find her “snobby.” She begins to maximize the traits she has in common with those around her and to minimize the traits they dislike. Her racial identity shifts like the colors of a chameleon, based on the color and safety of her surroundings. Racial profiling perpetuates and controls Walker’s adolescent life, and she often internal izes it, at one point keeping her mother away from a school play to distance herself from blackness. She succeeds hut pays the price— “shame sticks to me like sweat.” Also mixed throughout the book are glimpses into Walker’s burgeoning bisexuality. “On nights when I can convince her,” she recalls about her friend in the fourth grade, “Malai- ka plays Daddy and I play Mom my.... Some nights we play with one of my father’s old leather belts. I like LB : Do you see your bisex the sound of uality as another layer of your it...the warm Rebecca Walker reads from Black White and shifting self? Does it play into heat I feel Jew ish Jan. 14 at Powell’s Books the same binary difficulties you when Malai- faced with black and white? ka hits me, when Malaika plays Daddy.” Walker’s main goal in putting her past to RW: My bisexuality has kind of evolved, rather than being some big bang ohmigod-I-am- paper is to recast her history according to her own memory. Realizing she has been defined hisexual kind of thing. I have always felt energy with hoys and girls, men and women, and have by others her entire life, she is concentrated had wonderful relationships with both. on remembering herself the way she really was and not through the filter of other people’s There have definitely been moments in which I have felt that straight people don’t words. trust me because I love women, and there have This process, she writes, “makes me feel also been many moments when gay and lesbian younger now, new, and slightly terrified. Hav ing to remember my own life means that I people have challenged my allegiance because I am honest about my relationships with men. I have to feel it too.” just live my life and keep going. The most Rebecca Walker swapped e-mails with Just important thing for me right now is feeling Out to share how her life has changed since comfortable with myself, and, thank the Uni writing the hook— and how her memory is verse, most of the time I do. shaping up. Lisa Bradshaw: Do you feel you’ve reached that goal of remembering and defin ing yourself through your own eyes? Rebecca Walker: Claiming your subjectivi ty, that is, claiming your own experiences and own point of view, is a lifelong project. We can only get better at knowing and sticking up for ourselves, as opposed to doing what we think we should do or what might make others happy. Writing my book was a huge step in that process for me. L B : Has publishing this book made any inroads in your relationships with family? RW: There are many with whom I have been in touch because of the book, and that has been really wonderful. In most cases it has been heartening to know that whatever con nection we had as young people still LB : You don’t really talk about struggling with bisexuality in the book, although attrac tion to girls is obviously there. RW: My feelings about identities is that they need to he understood as fluid and not defining. I struggled for a long time around naming my book Black White and Jewish because I felt that in some way this title contradicted the message of the hook, which is that identities and cate gories— like race and class and gender— are all constantly shifting and changing, and are, to some extent, performative and not representa tive of some essential self. in R ebecca W alker reads from Black White and Jewish 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14 at Powell’s Books, 1005 W. Burnside St. LlSA B radshaw is the Culture Editor at Just Out. W e promote Lifestyle! 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