Walker speaks of search for self
By NOREEN GILLESPIE
News Writer
When author Rebecca Walker began to think about writing her most recent book, she wanted to compose a piece of writing that would talk about race emotionally.
She also wanted to write a book that would let readers see through the masks people wear and think about identity in terms of something other than racial, economic and regional categories.
The result was her book "Black, White and Jewish: An Autobiography of a Shifting Self," which she talked about Monday at Saint Mary's.
Walker, the mulatta Jewish daughter of feminist author Alice Walker, said the book was a journey for her to begin thinking about her own identity.
"I was facing adulthood in a very real way," Walker told a near-capacity audience in Carroll Auditorium. "In order to become a real adult, I really needed to make peace with my past."
For Walker, that meant analyzing her childhood experiences. The daughter of an aspiring author and a civil rights reformer in the deep south, Walker said she was born into a community that knew her as a "movement child."
But when the black power movement began shifting focus and her father's idealism changed, her parents' marriage began to disintegrate. That sent Walker into a nomadic childhood of shuffling around the country to different schools and homes.
"What I have had to reconcile is, who am I if I am not a movement child?" Walker said. "Who am I when the context that made me make sense no longer exists?"
Walker attended different schools across the country after her parents' divorce. From a liberal school in San Francisco, a racially mixed school in the Bronx and an upper-class suburban school in Larchmont, N.Y., Walker began to realize that people wear masks and follow a "social script" that predetermines how their race or class should act.
"Fundamentally, race, class and culture are performative," Walker said. "It was for me because I had to move back and forth between two worlds. Because I had to take these masks on and off, I got a sense that masks are not our essential selves."
Through passages from her book, Walker described her experience shifting from community to community. One passage described her visiting the black side of her family, where her uncle would joke about her "cracker" mannerisms and her aunt would try to cornroll the curls she got from her father.
Another passage described the gap she felt with her white cousin, and the caution they took to have polite conversation but never look too deeply into the other's eyes.
She remembers a constant subtext of judgment, she said, and a feeling that she never fully fit with either side.
Because she never fit into any conventional classification of race, the way she began to define the world around her was through place, Walker said.
"What happened to me is when I got to high school I started to travel a lot," she said. "I went to places where people looked like me."
But her experience is similar to much of America because everyone has identities beyond classifications, she said.
"We have to start to understand no matter how we are configured at the moment, there's another America down the corner," she said. "We have to start to bridge some of those distances and gaps and see ourselves as a truly pluralistic community."
Walker is one of the figureheads of the third wave feminist movement and was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 future leaders of America. She founded both the Third Wave Direct Action Group and the Third Wave Foundation, and made her acting debut in the movie Primary Colors.
Walker's lecture was the culminating event for Black History Month. She was brought to campus by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Sisters of Nefertitti.
All News Stories for Tuesday, February 26, 2002
