Rebecca Walker's Role in Self-Identified Multiracial Population - Essay Example

? Rebecca Walker Introduction An obscure foot in American history most often associated with pathology and disrepute, mixed race has become noticeable and relevant in recent times in a society where a growing number of mixed race people are asserting their right to cross established racial borders and belong to more than one racial group at the same time (Root xxii). Rebecca Walker is a representative of the rapidly growing self-identified multiracial population in the United States. Walker is black, white, Jewish, and American Indian. Her writing attempted to address what she perceived as missing in second-wave feminist discussions: women of color, multicultural alliances, and theories that explored the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. The anthology may have given ‘Third Wave Foundation’1, the multicultural network of young feminist activists co­-founded by Rebecca Walker. In this paper, I examine Walker's Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. In this mixed race fictional autobiography, Walker develops her multiracial identity, as she explores and expresses her experience growing up racially mixed in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. I read Walker and identify a historical experience, thematic thread, and expression to show that it differs from received conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race that have been understood in society and portrayed in the canons of American and American Ethnic literature in the categorical, dichotomous, and hierarchical terms of the binary racial idiom. The binary racial idiom has worked to suppress and distort mixed race bodies and lived realities in the culture at large insofar as it designates Americans as either white or black, white or other, and maintains, in conjunction with the social and legal rule of hypodescent (also known as the one-drop rule), the hierarchical valuation of whiteness over blackness by defining as black any racially mixed person with a quantum of African ancestry. Hence, following American racial common sense, the sum of black, white, and Jewish has been black. Nonetheless, Walker attempts to expose into view suppressed and silenced multiracial experience, complexity, and possibility. Body There have always been mixed race people in American history who have attempted to resist and circumvent the binary racial system. For a countless number of mixed race people "of a more European American phenotype and cultural orientation" (Daniel 49), the strategy of passing has been the most common form of resistance. In addition, sociologists and historians have identified groups of tri-racial isolates, mixed race people of black, white, and American Indian ancestry, who lived in rural communities in the mountains and in the backwoods apart from blacks and whites. There are also the Louisiana Creoles of Color who emerged as a community when Louisiana was a territory of Spain and then of France. In the US state of Louisiana, they resisted social and legal designation as black for more than a century to protect the rights and opportunities that had been granted to them under French rule. Furthermore, there existed blue-vein societies of mixed race people in the major Northern cities such as Washington D.C. and New York. Nevertheless, in nearly all cases, the mixed race people who attempted to resist the binary racial system nevertheless accepted the dichotomization between European Americans and blacks, as well as the hierarchical valuation of whiteness over blackness. For instance, tri-racial isolate communities accepted their status on the outskirts of organized society and tended to identify as Native American (Daniel 71). Blue-vein elites privileged and sought European culture, education, and somatic features, and the primary concern of Louisiana Creoles of Color was the preservation of the rights and privileges that had been allotted them because of their European heritage and education. It is an historical irony that a group of Creole elites, in an attempt to preserve their right to ride in the "whites only" train cars in Louisiana, initiated the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which resulted in the Supreme Court upholding the infamous "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896. "The Plessy decision not only set a judicial precedent for future court rulings on legal definitions of blackness but also enforced the legality of segregation, so long as separate facilities were equally maintained" (Daniel 81). The Court's decision resulted in the passage of more Jim Crow laws in the South, and reinforced as well as multiplied racist beliefs and practices across the nation. Finding themselves directly impacted by Jim Crow segregation and other racist practices in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson a large contingent of blue-vein elites decided to accept their socially designated black identity and, through their education and modest financial resources, assume positions of leadership in the black community. The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom were from blue-vein elite families, believed that the most effective strategy to counter the situation that faced them was to self-identify as black and combine forces with other blacks. However, Zack thinks that this collective strategy of blue-vein elites to identify themselves as black was unfortunate because it reinforced the existent biracial hierarchy and dichotomy, and, more significantly from her perspective, ruled out the possibility of sustaining and developing mixed race communities and identities: "What was lost was the concept of mixed race as a theoretical wedge against racism and against the concept of physical race -- the new combined black community threw away an effective intellectual weapon against racial designations, which is to say, against the core of American racism" (Zack 97). Nevertheless, Zack also notes to her credit in defense of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance that a concept of mixed race and a racial identity based on this concept could not have been relevant or pragmatically useful under the prevailing historical conditions. In the times that W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk predicted would be remembered as the century of the black-white color line, resistance to the biracial system entailed that racially mixed individuals identify as black, and thus multiracial possibilities, identities, and communities could neither be developed in the third person nor sustained in the first person (Du Bois 54) In the post-civil rights era where racial subjectivity and self-awareness have taken hold, it becomes historically possible to pursue, develop and sustain both in the first person and third person multiracial identities, politics, narratives, and communities. The decade of the 1990s and specifically the debate in Washington D.C. over how to include a formal mechanism ("check one or more race" option) to officially recognize and count the growing American multiracial population in Census 2000, as well as the texts of Walker, evidence the materialization of this statement. Unlike the civil rights minority movements of the 1970s and 1980s, the multiracial movement does not directly seek a redistribution of resources along particular racial lines. However, in a like manner to collective minority movements, the multiracial movement seeks state and public acknowledgement of its members, as well as the social and political rights that must be ceded to officially recognized groups of people. Furthermore, multiracial consciousness envisions and yearns for a pluralist social dynamic in the United States where multiracial diversity and other forms of social heterogeneity are no longer suppressed, obscured, and occluded, but are acknowledged, respected and allowed to flourish. The historical emergence of the multiracial consciousness is also in part coextensive and coterminous with a more fundamental historical shift known as the postmodern turn. In general, the postmodern signals the weakening and dissolution in Western capitalist societies of the grand narratives of modernity such as the emancipation of humanity and the life and history of Spirit. In contrast to modern thought, postmodern thought privileges local narratives over global ones; beings over Being; and difference and repetition over equality, resemblance, and opposition (Deleuze 302). For Walker, multiracial self identification becomes possible with the postmodern insight that key concepts of experience such as race, gender, and sexuality are relative to the specific social-historical-linguistic contexts from which they emerge. That is, Walker comes to realize that her multiracial experience, concern, and identity could not have taken shape, would not have been historically and socially possible had she grown up in a different time and place like their parents. Hence, a fundamental. question for Walker that, "Am I possible?" (Walker 25). A college student at Yale, Walker ponders this question for the first time after "a WASP-looking Jewish student strolls" (25) into her room drunk after a party and expresses his disbelief that she is both black and Jewish. She realizes after much reflection that for the first twenty years of her life being both black and Jewish at the same time was not possible because others had defined her and because she had always gone along with the prevailing view. She writes: As they speak I let my mind go blank; it is so much easier to be an empty screen for their projections, so much easier to believe all those nice words than to try to reach back there and piece it all together. After all these years it is second nature to me, this negation of my own mind, my own heart, my own story. Pushing the corners of memory far back into the recesses, 1 say to myself again and again: They remember it better. (74) Walker was able to remember and piece together her own story once she recognized that racial identities and experiences are historically constituted, and thus that she herself is a historical product of the civil rights movement, a "remnant" of this "ultimately unsustainable time. Who am I if I am not a Movement Child?" (60). Furthermore, she states that in the historical present "each configuration is already breeding its own dialectical response, its own disintegration" (166). Hence, "race" in and through the "unsustainable" civil rights movement impregnated the future with the possibility of new racial experiences, sensibilities, and identities. Having recourse to these insights, Walker has been able to question and resist the dictates of the one-drop rule and the tragic mulatto stereotype. She asserts: "I am not a bastard, the product of rape, the child of some white devil. I am a Movement Child…. I am not tragic" (24). In other words, in designating herself a movement child, multiracial identity becomes an option to pursue and develop, the strategy of passing is no longer necessary, and she no longer feels devastated and alienated when white people refer to her as "intimidating" or exclude her outright for being black, or when black people call her a "yellow bitch" or ridicule her for acting white. In addition, the process of coming to multiracial identity for Walker has been inextricably tied to a common experience of the body. He has become aware that her multiracial body, depending on the context, has functioned as signs that tell stories that she has not written and as blank screens on which strangers, friends, and lovers have projected racial fantasies, stereotypes, and essentialisms. For instance, born 1969, Walker's "little copper-colored body that held so much promise and broke so many rules" (60) came to be re-translated in the 1970s as an anomaly, a mistake, and a social problem. That is, considered a solution for the race problem by civil rights advocates and activists in the 1960s, "mulatto half-breeds" were once again seen as "tainted with the blood of the oppressor" (60), and her mother and father, once respected and trusted, were viewed with suspicion. Walker thus has learned through experience that her body is not "a symbol of interracial defiance" that transcends time and space, but an ambiguous sign that, relative to time and context, rarely makes sense to the prejudiced, regulative, and normative gaze of others. As a result, she has "never been at home in [her] body. Not in its color, not in its size or shape" (253). Each mask of racial belonging that she wore growing up was always connected to how others in a particular context perceived and translated her body. For this reason, she writes, "I have always wanted a story to go with this body" (74); her own mixed race story that reveals the history, status, and possibility of her ambiguous multiracial body. In other words, Walker has learned from the pain of first-hand experience that in a society structured through the binary racial idiom the multiracial body functions as an object-sign for misdirected, harmful, and often devastating racial projections and translations. Walker has come to awareness that the multiracial body oftentimes functions as a blank screen for projections that are simultaneously racial and sexual. Her multiracial experiences evidence Judith Butler's point in Bodies That Matter that the body, race, and sexuality need to be thought, not as analogous and parallel, but as interrelated: "it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not only as ones through which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as well as contested" (Butler 18). Moreover, Walker has also learned from her multiracial experience that the perception that others have had of her multiracial body has, in part, shaped and delimited the development of her sexuality and her desire for romantic partners. For instance, Walker sees a connection between her promiscuity at a young age and her multiracial body: "Their attention is the salve that coats the wound, is the sound that drowns out all the people who don't like black white girls, who don't like white black girls, who don't like me, the skin on my body having determined this long before I have even had a chance to speak" (Walker 254). Furthermore, Walker implies that the hurt that she experienced in relationships for not being authentically black or white was a significant factor in her choice of romantic partners in relationships that followed. Walker has also learned that coming to speak as multiracial entails the insight that it is not possible to transcend race and other social-linguistic concepts of experience such as gender and sexuality. Hence, she would concur with Goldberg's point in Racist Culture that "… the strategy of 'standing inside the categories' of racial othering provides an effective means of redirecting racial orders, of altering their significance and effects, of making them work against the practices of exclusion they were supposed to further" (Goldberg 229). This strategy of "standing inside the categories" is apparent in Walker as she ponders somewhere in her late twenties, at the urging of her lover, what it feels like to be racially mixed and part white "operating within" the construct of "race" (Walker 303). Walker replies that it is hard to say for certain what she feels because she cannot know what it would feel like to exist outside of the categories of race. However, when pressed, she describes the feeling as one of lack. Furthermore, Walker refers to the strategy of negotiating race from within its categories at a guest lecture that she gives at a college when a young black mother asks her for a solid reason for why she should not raise her half-white and half-black daughter as black. Walker advises the young mother that she should tell her daughter that she is related to whiteness even though the "real world" will continue to see her and treat her as black: I maintain that there is a "real" world to be negotiated, but not wholly defined by. There are parallel worlds, I say, internal and external, no less real. She posits that black people are going to be the only ones who accept her daughter anyway, so why should she set her up for rejection by letting her think she's related to whiteness? … People are going to question your daughter no matter what, I say. She may as well be armed and prepared to fight back with what is, rather than what those people wish was. (289-290) In other words, Walker suggests to the mother that race and its categories are not fixed and thus do not have to determine racial identity, and furthermore that the established dictates of race can be resisted and modified insofar as one is daring enough to speak truth to power. In the case of the mother, this means that she would have to arm her daughter with "what is" rather than with what people "wish was". Of course, this truth that Walker urges the mother to tell to her daughter is a contingent and contextually bounded truth. Nevertheless, Walker knows from personal experience that it is as good as fact, that today multiracial possibilities can be pursued and developed. In other words, Walker sees no reason for this little girl not to have the option of multiracial identity in the present historical milieu. So instead of screaming or walking away from the mother, Walker continues the dialog, "almost missing [her] plane, glued to an orange wool auditorium seat, fighting on behalf of a child I will probably never meet" (289). Conclusion In conclusion, it should follow that the multiracial identity that Walker portrays and develops is historically and conceptually different from racial identities and narratives based on the binary racial idiom. Stated in different terms, Walker, if not ignored, should complicate standard discussions on race and racism in the United States that remain mired in the dichotomous, hierarchical, and essentialist logic of binary racial idiom. Academics, politicians, intellectuals, as well as other experts and community leaders who participate in these standard discussions, are usually well intended, but they have been inclined nevertheless to ignore Lawrence Houge's contention in Race, Modernity, Post modernity that in postmodern America "with racial traditions diminished, mini-narratives, new forms of sensibilities, and new conceptions of the subject become visible, which are in contrast to the modalities of racial traditions" (Houge 17). In postmodern America, and as products of a postmodern and post-civil rights America, Walker has tried to express and to do justice to the mixed race differ end – to silenced, suppressed, and neglected multiracial experience, lived reality, and possibility. In other words, by way of her fictional autobiography, she has made her contribution toward the becoming of a nascent and undetermined multiracial idiom and culture. Work Cited Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print. Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Random House, 1990. Print. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Print. Goldberg, David. Racist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Print. Heywood, Leslie. & Drake, Jennifer. Third wave agenda: being feminist, doing feminism, University Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition, 1997. Houge, Lawrence W. Race, Modernity, Post modernity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Print. Walker, Rebecca. Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. Print. Zack, Naomi. Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. Print. Read More