Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave.
March 27, 2008
I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find - 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 -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 -and only partly due to the fact that we have
Native American genes - 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
March 27, 2008
I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find - 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 -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 -and only partly due to the fact that we have
Native American genes - 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
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