Double Consciousness Experiences of Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker describes her mixed race experiences as a kind of “double consciousness” where she always also seeing herself through the eyes of others. Look more closely at how Walker explores the “mask” that she wears as a mixed race person. Caroline Streeter dismisses walker as reproducing the narrative of the “tragic mulatta” yet how does walker’s doubleness possibly challenge this representation? In other words, are there moments where Walker challenges the notion that mixed race women are doomed to become the sexual objects of white men?

Introduction

Black, White, and Jewish is a story written by Rebecca Walker the daughter of a famous African-American Author who wrote various In this book Walker explores the “mask” that she wears as a mixed-race person. Walker remembers her confusing transition from childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. She explains the challenges of bouncing back and forth between two families of different background. She had a black family in San Francisco and a white family in the city of New York. In the book, Walker skips from one event to another both formative and mundane to show Walkers broken and fragmented sense of self-identity. She explains how she lacked supervision, which she much enjoyed but on the other hand, she confesses to having different opinions and feeling about the much-wanted freedom.

Rebecca Walker describe her mixed race experiences as a kind of “double consciousness” where she always sees herself through the eyes of others. I will look more closely at how Walker explores the “mask” that she wears as a mixed-race person. This notion is seen where walker writes: That Jackie, a relative, and walker have a crucial thing in common that they are both outsiders because Walker is biracial and Jackie is married to Catholic lady. Walker says hopes for getting a unified identity are in jeopardy because she says she doesn’t believe her mother who is African-American is able to cope with her extended Jewish family.(Rebecca)

In addition, walker like Jackie picked the same habit of hiding in a closed bathroom; this shows she was fighting on how to identify herself. Walker worried of the fact that her family may probably fall apart when her African-American mother stops sleeping with father, she spent nights in Walker's bedroom where she cried herself to sleep. Walker family separates and his father marries another woman her mother and her are forced to move out and they go to Atlanta to Walkers mum’s brother. She hopes that staying with a black family will much help in reconciling her identity crisis. With her new friend Lena, she begins to experiment with various drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Not even getting her first period she begins to take birth control pills, but I am also either. “Before even coming into reality with herself her parents decide it’s better for her to live with her father in New York thus, she returns to the East, All over sudden instead of Walker hanging with black friends to identify her identity, she is in the East surrounded by white, Jewish youths. This makes her try to fit and embrace another lifestyle that is Jewish lifestyle by attending Mitzvah but her conscious fails to speak. This proves that Walker is fighting “double consciousness” and is unable to identify herself but to rely on others to identify her. This portrayed where Walker after getting back To New York she begins to associate with Latinos who call her “mullato” but she doesn’t care as long they accept her in their circle. This is proof that Walker has reached a point where she no longer wants to identify herself but she wants just to fit in. She doesn’t know herself due to racial factors.

Two years down the line Walker moves back to San Francisco reason been her discomfort around her white stepmother, father, and stepsister. She feels jealous towards her white step sister whose identity and race less fragmented. Walker doesn’t feel a sense of belonging and is unable to identify herself thus why she is bouncing back and from East to West in search of identity. Her life changes drastically and she finds herself alone and lonely. Where does she belong? Is she black? Is she white? Walker during this time ends up having white friends, black friends, Hispanic friends and also finds herself being sexually active at a very young age because she seeks comfort. Her mother leaves her alone at home and she has to fend for herself. Her father ends up being disconnected to Rebecca and so that leaves her not knowing where she belongs. She experiments with drugs and finds herself pregnant at fourteen. When she tells her mother, they both agree that abortion is the best thing to do.

Rebecca lived a shuttled back and forth life, as seen earlier, spending two years with her writer mom on the West Coast, then two in the East with her civil rights lawyer dad and his new family, then back again. Identity is an issue for every kid, but for Rebecca, it was especially challenging; she was too black for one East Coast boyfriend, not black enough for the tough girls in her San Francisco school. (In New York, at one point, she hung with Puerto Rican kids, because they seemed more welcoming than either blacks or whites.) This life proved too hard for Rebecca Walker to identify herself to a particular group thus leading her to explore in the hope of finding her identity. Walker found it difficult in unmasking this due to much differences and unacceptance by the white family.

On the other hand, Caroline Streeter dismisses walker as reproducing the narrative of the “tragic mulatta”In her book, Caroline Streeter,Tragic No More chapter 4,“Faking the Funk: Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and the politics of passing” on the other hand dismiss Walker as reproducing the narrative of the “tragic mulatta” says that Mulatto hasn’t been displaced. Streeter says that the politics of passing Alicia Keys and Mariah Carey are perfect figures on which to consider the post-civil rights era’s apparent transformation and rehabilitation of the so Mullato as the walker white friends referred her. She argues that the rise of the black culture in the between 1980-1990 virtually was the reason behind that invention of the history that faced the African-American racial. According to Streeter the economic advantages that the white or the White Jewish have over the black/white which led to half American to be underestimated and looked down upon haven’t changed much. But’s it’s the blacks who have earned a status of been wanted or desirability. (Streeter)

Conclusion

Walker experiences a hectic and difficult lifestyle as she faces issues on self-identity and race, thus bringing a problem that American Citizens are facing without their conscious.