LEST WE FORGET, An Open Letter To My Sisters Who Are Brave
From Alice Walker
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. 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.
*During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as
"Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.
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
Cazul
Northern California
First Day of Spring
March 21, 2008
------ End of Forwarded Message
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