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Alice Walker’s Powerful Story
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Last month, Alice Walker published an open letter, Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave, about why she is supporting Barack Obama for president. It is a perfect example of the power of stories to influence in ways that “facts” and “logic” cannot. Stories provide the context that is crucial to understanding another’s perspective.
In the United States, we often forget about the context of this country’s history. We like to think that we can relegate injustice and inequity to the past and look at the present as if there were a clean slate. Stories like Alice Walker’s, however, illustrate the need to view the present in the context of history.
Walker points out the need to take history into account when discussing young female members of her own family:
“[B]ecause 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.”
Walker makes clear that she is not supporting Obama simply because he is black:
“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.”
But she also points out the importance of not being “color blind” in examining the present:
“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.”
She concludes her article making it clear that we need to work together and “build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth.”
The only way we can understand each other’s truth is by hearing each others’ stories.
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