Photography by Lori K. Tate
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” Alice Walker
This quote popped up on my daily calendar the other day, and though it hit smack dab in the middle of home, I had no idea who Alice Walker was. A quick Google search revealed that Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker wrote The Color Purple and is also a poet and social activist. What timing! Her quote presented a Eureka moment for me because we’re in such a time of imperative social change, but it also gave me yet another moment to bow my head in a shadow of shame.
I know about The Color Purple. Oprah Winfrey is in it. So is Whoopi. And I think it won an Academy Award (let me check, no it didn’t after being nominated for 11 Oscars). Regardless, I’ve never seen it. The tiny snippet I did see of the film years ago scared me, so I turned away, not realizing what a privilege it was to simply turn my head and do something else. I never even tried to read the book — or see the musical.
I can’t turn my head anymore. I can’t. I don’t want to, and I hope that you don’t either. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, my eyes were opened to the institutionalized and systemic racism in this country a couple of years ago when I took a class at my children’s school. And though the lessons I learned were shoved in the back of my head when family illness took the forefront, I made sure they were stored. Now as I pull out the books and articles from the class, I want to dig deeper and try to navigate my part and my family’s part in making things better for people of color.
My challenge is roots. Yes, there’s the movie of the same name, and I watched that movie in horror during my high school U.S. History class, but the roots I’m talking about run deep in the South, entangled in casseroles, crocheted quilts and a litany of “bless your hearts.”
I grew up in the country, where people have good hearts and will do anything for you. That’s not an easy thing to come by these days, and I’m grateful that I grew up in that environment. However, within that web of goodness, there are pockets of ideals and beliefs with which I don’t agree, especially among the older generations.
For years, I’ve remained silent when someone made a racist or offensive comment in my presence. When I was in sixth grade, my late uncle scoffed at me when I told him I was a feminist. “You don’t believe that junk, Lori,” he said.
As a 47-year-old white southern woman of extreme privilege, I struggle with how to reconcile the world I grew up in with the world I inhabit now, the world where we’re raising our children to do better than past generations. I was taught that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, but I think that’s just another way of putting Baby in the corner. I’m tired of being in the corner.
I’m tired of seeing people suffer. I’m tired of preconceived notions and stereotypes. I’m tired for my black friends who have to think about every little thing they say and do. On a much, much lighter level, I know what that’s like. It’s maddening to stand there and listen to something so far out of your belief system that you need a telescope to see it, and then say nothing because you don’t want to lose your job, your friends, your kids’ friends — your roots.
But here in this moment, not speaking up feels criminal. Not doing something feels irresponsible. We have to listen. We have to learn. And then we have to work together and follow through. We have to do better, and I think that we can. At least, I hope that we can. So Alice, thank you for this quote. It’s time for me to break my silence and grow.