Comments about Black, White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker

Black, White and Jewish is one of the LC's Book Club books. I just finished reading it over the weekend.

The book is about Rebecca Walker's experience growing up, well, black, white and Jewish. She is Alice Walker's daughter (the author of The Color Purple). It was interesting to read Rebecca's observations about how she made sense of herself and how others reacted to her. Part of the conflict she had was that her parents divorced when she was around 8, I think. After the divorce, she had to split time between her mom's house and her dad's house. Before long, her dad married a white woman. Really, most of the book is about shifting between these different worlds: her mom's house where she pretty much took care of herself and rarely saw her mom and hung out with a more multicultural crowd (sometimes with all white people, sometimes with Chicanos, other times with black people, and occasionally with another mixed family). When she was in her dad's world, it was mostly all white and also Jewish, but Jewish to differing degrees.
I felt like the book was as much about negotiating these different selves she was expected to be from one household to the next as much as it was about the ethnicity. The rules changed, geography and school types changed, friends changed. Not much ever remained the same for her.

It was really sad to me b/c she grew up so quickly. I'd have to look at the book to say for sure, but her first sexual experience was when she was around 12 or 13. She also roamed the streets of San Francisco with a same-aged friend of hers in search of pot when she was around 12. Part of it makes me want to say to Alice Walker, "Yeah, you wrote some great fiction and rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston, but at what cost to your own daughter? Where were you for her?" It's pretty clear from the book that Alice Walker tried to get Rebecca Walker to be as independent as possible and had great hope for what she could accomplish. That hope was there in the beginning when Rebecca is this tangible product of a genuine love between a black woman and a white man. Rebecca's parents, as civil rights people, believed they were doing a wonderful thing and she was a symbol of the peace and harmony that was to come. But the pressures of the day became too much and their marriage eventually dissolved, leaving Rebecca to question what she was now.

The time and places Walker writes about brought to mind experiences I have had. I believe she is about 10-15 years older than I am, but some of the fashion and music was stuff that I remembered from very early youth. I too can recall wearing purple corduroy pants and jelly shoes. The music of her teen years was around in the background of my elementary years.

What it especially made me think of was my own interaction with issues of race when I was younger. Rebecca Walker was often the only or one of the only people of color in some of her schools. I had a similar but also opposite situation. For the first 5 years of school, I was bussed to a school in downtown San Diego because the school did not have enough white children in it. Each class picture I have from then will show you 15-20 black children of differing levels of color and then 3 or so white kids. I'm always the goofy looking blond girl. Though I did not do this to the same degree that Walker did, to some extent I too learned a different world when at school and then another when back on the military base when I went home. School friends double-dutched and "based" on one another (kind of short for debasing, similar to dissing). Home friends were obsessed with Star Wars and Thundercats (Thundercats, ho!) and, because we were on NAS Miramar, Top Gun as well. I'm not sure how many of us were aware that when we went home we had different worlds from one another. I can't recall it ever coming up or being a problem. I do remember one family from the school had been in the newspaper in an article discussing mixed families. It was still relatively rare when I was a kid 10-15 years after Walker's life story.

I do know that at some point I started to realize that I belonged to a priveleged minority when I was younger. Though there were relatively few white kids at the school, I wasn't picked on. If anything, I think the way we were singled out was for more attention by the teachers. I went to 5 years of that school in downtown San Diego. I can only remember 4 of the teachers. 3 of them were white. The remaining one may have been Asian-American, and I cannot remember the fifth teacher at all (did I not go to 1st grade?). The principle was African-American. Anyway, the whole point is that it is not too surprising to me today that I was called on and singled out for student-of-the-month awards and GATE testing when I was one of a couple of white kids and had white teachers. I am a little surprised that there were never any fights, but I think race matters less to younger kids than it does as they grow older and pick up on things that adults have said or done.