Alice Walker on the Democratic Nomination

Posted 29 March, 2008 at 1:45 pm by Kevin
Filed Under Racism, U.S. Studies, Womanism/Feminism |

Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave.

What I admire about Alice Walker and her work is that she never shies away from an honest look at the complexities of a situation. I read pieces like this, and I wish she were running for president. A few snippets that I feel address the depressing disconnect that this nomination race has produced:

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 feel that this story is one that those who wish to imagine we are in some post-racial paradise fail to recognize. This is a story that folks in my generation hear from our grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles all the time. This history is still very much alive in black folks lives, and I fell that it is ridiculous to expect us to simply put it all behind us because it all happened back then.

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 –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

Tragic indeed. Not to mention overly simplistic and insulting to people’s intelligence.

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?

This is important. She doesn’t flat out say it, but I feel she is addressing the more vocal supporters of Sen. Obama, who often seem to think that he can do no wrong, or seem to think that any criticism of Sen. Obama on policy makes you a traitor to the cause. I feel that some Obama supporters have lost sight of the need to hold our (or this particular) elected officials accountable. This is especially true for progressives. It is, after all, our duty as participants in a democracy and can only help ensure that we get the candidate that we think we’re getting. I read this as Walker saying, “Look, this is what we expect of you, Sen. Obama. You better not let us down.”

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 am so glad she brought this up–white normalization of general terms. It’s something that has bugged me to no end. We hear terms like woman, man, American, and the assumption in our society is that we are talking about white women, men, Americans. It is not until we move to people who are not normalized as the default in our society that we must start adding adjectives and qualifies. This is one reason why I struggle with the term African-American. I feel that it aids in normalizing American as white and helps to reinforce the notion that black folks are an hyphenated anomaly (I’ll refrain from ranting about the use of the word America, technically a continent, or at the least a bunch of sub-continents, to mean The United States of America, a country. Same with Africa).

I’m probably starting to exceed the bounds of fair use here, so I’ll end with the final paragraph, which I find to be a powerful and wise closing statement. Go read the entire thing yourself, please.

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

Yes. We must always remember that the best leaders have always been and will always be, the best followers.

Oh, and might I add: It’s always nice to read something in support of Sen. Obama that does not constantly refer to Sen. Clinton as Billary. That annoys me to no end too. She is, after all, not joined at the hip to her husband. It’s one thing to disagree with her politics, or how her campaign is being run, but at least grant her the dignity of being an individual woman. That is, after all, what we are working for, right? Dignity for all humans, even those we disagree with or don’t like?

[Hat tip to Jack and Jill Politics]

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