all photos Jennifer Esperanza ©
By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com
The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or
gender, but on truth.
March 27, 2008
I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find that because of the
presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race
for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the
old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the
Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves
just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is
a space with which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation
that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May
Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white
girls as 'Miss' when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never
admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my
parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she
responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.
They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and
processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran
her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my
father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any
hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green
shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of
Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty
tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a
girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned
to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their
competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to
feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten
dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay
that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a
nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the
dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus
carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my
brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my
parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks
while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick.
We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that 'Jane' and 'Dick'
had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black
children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started
reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had
had no idea so kept from black people it had been that such a place
existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public
library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and
will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or
raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties
it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had
been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because
they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote. I wish I
could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better
than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to
me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of
their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in
Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in
Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who
loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they
did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for
instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the
Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to
the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other
trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because,
in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality,
this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to
make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I
knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to
lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the
country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep
sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see
him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh
choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions
of Americans â€"black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over
Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I
thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required.
Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense
mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable
human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like
Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of
our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and
for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we
are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other
than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not
mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important
points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person
of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and
raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people,
after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see
suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I
understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a
people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends
and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn
their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard
Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is
beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the
on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to
destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior
towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to
cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All
colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same,
whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand;
our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand
what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I
want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, 'enemy' or
'friend,' and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to
understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and
talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a
proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot.
But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them,
human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she
felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as 'a woman'
while Barack Obama is always referred to as 'a black man.' One would
think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she
is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in
her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react
to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of
her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person,
with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with
no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I
cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into
Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white
privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so
marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States.
My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in
Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is
leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have
cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in
the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and
because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including
some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama.
I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there
is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still
plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even
though our family has been here longer than most North American
families â€" and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American
genes â€" we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote,
and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word 'Womanism' many years ago, it was to give us a
tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These
are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our
singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white
women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in
brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man
or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence,
compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color
support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old
white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black
women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of
them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line
for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving
the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we
wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as
the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we
head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the
meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to
celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of
our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race,
ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on
Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing.
Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our
country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us
toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually
and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do
the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this
of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard
work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination.
And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never
tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Namaste;
And with all my love,
Alice Walker
Cazul
Northern California
By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com
The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or
gender, but on truth.
March 27, 2008
I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find that because of the
presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race
for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the
old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the
Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves
just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is
a space with which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation
that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May
Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white
girls as 'Miss' when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never
admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my
parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she
responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.
They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and
processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran
her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my
father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any
hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green
shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of
Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty
tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a
girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned
to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their
competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to
feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten
dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay
that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a
nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the
dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus
carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my
brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my
parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks
while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick.
We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that 'Jane' and 'Dick'
had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black
children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started
reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had
had no idea so kept from black people it had been that such a place
existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public
library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and
will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or
raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties
it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had
been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because
they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote. I wish I
could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better
than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to
me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of
their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in
Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in
Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who
loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they
did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for
instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the
Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to
the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other
trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because,
in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality,
this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to
make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I
knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to
lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the
country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep
sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see
him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh
choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions
of Americans â€"black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over
Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I
thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required.
Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense
mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable
human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like
Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of
our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and
for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we
are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other
than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not
mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important
points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person
of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and
raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people,
after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see
suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I
understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a
people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends
and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn
their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard
Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is
beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the
on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to
destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior
towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to
cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All
colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same,
whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand;
our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand
what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I
want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, 'enemy' or
'friend,' and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to
understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and
talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a
proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot.
But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them,
human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she
felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as 'a woman'
while Barack Obama is always referred to as 'a black man.' One would
think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she
is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in
her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react
to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of
her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person,
with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with
no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I
cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into
Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white
privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so
marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States.
My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in
Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is
leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have
cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in
the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and
because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including
some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama.
I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there
is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still
plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even
though our family has been here longer than most North American
families â€" and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American
genes â€" we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote,
and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word 'Womanism' many years ago, it was to give us a
tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These
are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our
singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white
women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in
brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man
or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence,
compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color
support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old
white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black
women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of
them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line
for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving
the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we
wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as
the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we
head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the
meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to
celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of
our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race,
ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on
Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing.
Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our
country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us
toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually
and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do
the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this
of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard
work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination.
And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never
tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Namaste;
And with all my love,
Alice Walker
Cazul
Northern California
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