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Rebecca Walker Freedom to become who we are It’s a Long Story – Rebecca Walker Edwina Throsby: From Sydney Opera House, welcome to It’s a Long Story, a podcast exploring the lives behind the ideas. I’m Edwina Throsby. Rebecca Walker: That's what we all need permission to do is to become who we are, you know. ET: The daughter of Alice Walker, who wrote the African-American classic The Color Purple, and Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, Rebecca Walker’s intersecting and sometimes jarring identities were the foundation of her career. In 1992, her article for Ms Magazine called ‘I am the Third Wave’ crystallised her thinking around feminism and activism. Its massive success spurred on her work: she established the Third Wave Fund to support young women from diverse backgrounds to pursue activism and leadership. Then, multiple memoirs, essay collections and a novel followed. Rebecca’s work has always been a response to her personal situation, be it family, identity, becoming a mother, masculinity, race, Buddhism, or a combination of all of these, and she has developed a strong and compelling ethos about what it means to live a feminist life in an ever-changing world. Rebecca Walker, thank you very much for coming and speaking to us on "It's a Long Story". RW: It's my pleasure. I'm so happy to be here with you. Chapter 1: Early life, identity, feminism. ET: As a mixed race baby born in Mississippi to civil rights activist parents, your very existence is something of a political statement. How were your personal politics formed? RW: My parents met in the civil rights movement. My father was a young idealistic Jewish law student who was recruited by the NAACP Legal Defence Fund to move to Mississippi and help desegregate public schools and work on several other important cases. In the mid '60s, my mother was a young aspiring African-American writer from the Deep South, who was following the call of Dr. King to register voters. And also she was someone who felt very strongly that the stories of black women needed to be told and she wanted to be a part of telling them. And they met and fell in love and faced incredible persecution as a couple before they were married and then after they married. They married in New York because they weren't allowed to marry in Mississippi where it was against the law for black people to marry white people. And so I grew up as a kind of movement child. I was born into the civil rights movement. My parents thought of my body and my being as a post-racial sort of promise. And I think their optimism and their narrative of me and of what they believed in very much underscore who I became and who I am and what I believe in. And so does the fact that they divorced when I was very young and they both went sort of back to their original communities. And I spent a lot of time moving back and forth between a kind of upper middleclass white Jewish East Coast world and a very Afro Bohemian mixed culture on the West Coast kind of counterculture. And even within those two locations I spanned many different realities. The validity that my political identity was forged in sort of the identity of my birth which was to further the understanding that difference is not as important. It is not the signifier nor should it used as a weapon. But also this idea of the way I moved around so much and so adaptive, you know, and had to, to wear different masks in order to belong to these different communities after the divorce. ET: That's really interesting because I've just been rereading your autobiography "Black, White, Jewish" and one of the things that really strikes me at rereading is how so much of your childhood and adolescence was looking for a place to fit and kind of being pushed out, like always feeling like if you just did this a little different or you were inherently a little different then maybe that would be the moment where you'd sort of slot down into the space that you fit. And never quite finding that sort of smooth transition which could be said is the way that every kid grows up, but with you, you had such sort of powerful signifiers around that, that negotiating your space and way you fit in a very transient world— RW: Yeah. ET: It was something that was always front of mind for you, right? RW: Yes, absolutely. You know one of the reasons I wrote "Black, White and Jewish" I wrote it when I was in my 20s and I needed to write it because I had felt so psychologically fragmented because I had to move between these different worlds and didn't really feel that I was-- that I belonged in any of them fully. And the project of holding all of the worlds and holding the person that I needed to be in each of the worlds, was leading to a kind of psychological pressure that was tremendous. And the journey of writing "Black, White and Jewish" was about finding a space, you know, where all of the different selves and all of the different experiences could actually coexist. That that really opened the door to my own integration, my own psychological integration because by the end of that book I had really come to realise that I had been performing identities and wearing different masks and taking them off and putting them on for so long. And that it was not creating the kind of ease and stability and peace that I longed for. So I was on my journey and to find the resolution I was looking for, I was forced to come to this understanding that no matter how many performances I do there is a Rebecca, there is a being that is underneath all of those performances. And that is the being that I want to know and to feed and to love and to own. And to just release myself into that as opposed to trying so desperately to figure out what was needed in any given moment in order to be accepted or approved of. And all of that just had to fall away in order for me to survive and thrive. And that was work that has served me now very well, you know, for many years. I often say that if I hadn't written that book, I would have a nervous breakdown. And now, you know, on the other side of it I realised that that's probably true and also one of the great joys is that I did get this kind of freedom and also the book has been very helpful for many others and I've heard so much from readers. The magic for me, the reason to do any of it is that moment when the person who's looking and needing what you have to give finds it. And I definitely I feel that very strongly about "Black, White and Jewish" that there was a community of mixed race people that were largely invisible at the time that I wrote that book. And so I feel very, very proud and privileged to have been able to contribute at that moment in that way. ET: It's like you're proud of being able to use your own experience to kind of guide other people or give other people some sort of shape for their own experiences. And it-- funny thinking about your own childhood how many people there were that came in to your life and had their influence and their impact on your life right through growing up. I mean, moving between-- moving houses on the East Coast, moving around on the West Coast, moving between the two, moving schools, moving friendship groups. It just feels like at various points in your life, there were these beacon people or these important people that shaped you and moulded you. Who in your life had the really profound influence, were there several people? RW: It's interesting that my grandmother, actually my paternal grandmother was very, very important to me. Even though-- and I didn't realise this until much later, but my-- this was the grandmother who disowned my father for marrying my mother and was deeply racist and rejected my own mother. And yet, when I was born, she rushed to our home in Mississippi and brought my mother a washing machine. And, you know, in the Jewish tradition, the first grandchild is kind of a big deal and I was the first grandchild and then she proceeded to spoil me and love me unconditionally until she died. And we had a very potent relationship. I think it was fortunate that I did not know about what was happening between her and my mum for as long as I didn't know. That was good because it allowed us to actually bond. But she was stable. She was loving, she-- You know, I was brown and she was obviously not. And everywhere we went, she would make sure to announce that I was hers, you know, this is Rebecca. This is my grand daughter. Isn't she beautiful? Doesn't she look just like me, you know. And she just constantly just embraced me and was proud and so she was an early supporter.
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