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!
Jewelry for men and women
New T re<
+ w +
E A G ER TO
M EET NEW
Fine and folk art from
the world over
TnevfCan
PEO PLE?
0 „ . c k o u ( o u T n p " w(4> <i{p
w w w JlU g o flo n liU fC 0 !!!
f«>r Hip |<> t»«> n ii»rnj ^ online ooufx,n<
QOLD DOOR
Jewelry and Art
1434 SE 37th A v (off Hawthorne)
Open every day
503-232-6069
<J-in d new
in the
'"personal
P age
45
|jw'F and |)rmk ^ppciak
nacli«< -f- pncliilaJa« -f- lac«<
0 r\c«l
\f*»tvln'J Ihr.i [rulatj 4|’m -(ip TV
an* I (of •Jou |o(r«)i(*lit m"< W Wk.
1 l)ur.,la'jf fn.1.^
+ WIN I ffi 110
+
ctin-wp.l ||:3()a»n-|()j,m
(IliiN -« «! ||;^()aiT J_n ilc ln i|p
|()|’ni-m«*ltntr!
o()asitt9%
*tf)l2 ^L Wa*'l^”rnr OH'f
jjpt«rr*n
4 ()th
nT,*l * 4 / It*