black white and jewish by rebecca walker

To take an individual as an example that relates to an entire social movement, even if the individual is one's self is problematic. However, the power of Walker's personal prose occasionally obscures the muddiness of the generalizing implications of her argument. Walker presents her self and her life as a kind of case study of what may occur when a social experiment is attempted upon the flesh of a young child, who desires stability above all things. He was a man who embarked with Alice Walker on an experiment during the 1960's, an experiment of doing away with conventional notions of identity.

Her father, although not famous in a conventional sense, began his career at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Her mother is the famous author of The Color Purple, namely Alice Walker. Rebecca Walker admits she is not simply the child of an African-American woman and a Jewish father. It should be noted, however, Walker is no ordinary young writer. The book does on to describe, with great poignancy, the author's perceived difficulty of living with a dual, often uncomfortable identity of whiteness and blackness, of Jewishness and 'gentileness.' Rebecca Walker's memoir Black, White, and Jewish, is subtitled 'Autobiography of a Shifting Self.' Walker states that is a woman who is most comfortable 'in airports' because they are 'limbo spaces - blank, undemanding, neutral.' (3) In contrast, because of her multi-racial and multi-ethnic identity, she is both never 'neutral' and also never quite 'of a color.' Only in airports to the rules of the world completely apply to her as well as to the rest of the world, Walker states - and even then, this statement has an irony, given the recent events and controversies over airport racial profiling that occurred after the book's publication. Black, White, and Jewish - the Source of All Rebecca Walker's Angst?

Black white and jewish by rebecca walker