Alice Walker Stands Up In Support of the Palestinian People in the Gaza

Alice Walker

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/28/it_takes_people_on_the_outside

All,

As I've said many times it takes genuine courage, vision, and moral independence to lead and it's inspiring to see the legendary author Alice Walker assert real leadership in this struggle and willingly challenge and go up against both the U.S. and Israeli governments alike in the universal name of Justice and Freedom to openly help and support the oppressed people of the Gaza and affirm and uphold the fundamental human and civil rights of the Palestinian people. It's also equally inspiring and far more than a little ironic that the name of the Gazan aid ship that Alice and her fellow "freedom passengers" are sailing on is called "The Audacity of Hope." Let that be an eternal lesson to and glorious rebuke of the failed foreign policies and cowardly actions of the Obama administration in the ongoing historical struggle of the Palestinians for full sovereignty, self determination, and independence in the Middle East.

Kofi



"I am going to Gaza because my government has failed, it has failed us, it has failed to understand or to care about the Gazan people. But worse than that, our government is ignorant of our own history in the United States. For instance, when black people were enslaved for 300 years, it took a lot of people from outside of our communities to come to help free us. And also, during the period of the civil rights movement, which was 19—in the 1960s, again, it took people from outside of our own communities to come and help us free ourselves. This is a fine tradition of going to people who need us wherever they exist on the planet. This is our responsibility. This is what we are here for as human beings...I also feel that when our government, in the person of our president, can make a speech about this area, and really speak only to the Israelis and not to the Palestinians, this is unacceptable. We cannot accept this. I mean, we look at what has happened to the Palestinian people for all of these decades, and it is insufferable. We will not accept it. We will not. As Americans, with our history of enslavement of people, of segregation, of apartheid, of brutalization, of lynching, we will not accept this. We will not. So, Gazans, and especially the children, we are on our way. We are coming. We hear you. We are coming."

--Alice Walker, June 27, 2011

It Takes People on the Outside: Prestigious Author Alice Walker to Confront Israeli Naval Blockade of Gaza on U.S. Aid Ship
June 28, 2011
Democracy Now!

Israel continues to threaten a group of international activists planning to sail to Gaza this week with humanitarian aid. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said participants in the 10-boat flotilla are seeking "confrontation and blood." Last year, Israeli forces killed nine people aboard the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara. Meanwhile, activists say one of the 10 boats scheduled to sail to Gaza has been sabotaged in a Greek port. Saboteurs reportedly cut off the propeller shaft of a ship shared by Swedish, Norwegian and Greek activists. Organizers say the boat will be repaired in time to sail to Gaza. One of the other ships that will try to reach Gaza from Greece is the "Audacity of Hope." It’s set to carry up to 50 U.S. citizens carrying letters to Gaza residents. One of the ship’s passengers is the acclaimed author, poet and activist Alice Walker. She has written many books, including “The Color Purple,” for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. On Monday, Alice Walker spoke at a Freedom Flotilla news conference in the Greek capital of Athens. “I am going to Gaza because my government has failed, it has failed us, it has failed to understand or to care about the Gazan people. But worse than that, our government is ignorant of our own history in the United States,” Walker said. “For instance, when black people were enslaved for 300 years, it took a lot of people in the outside of our communities to help free us.”

Filed under Gaza Flotilla, Gaza, Israel & Palestine

Alice Walker, acclaimed author, poet and activist. She has written many books, including The Color Purple, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She plans to join the U.S.-flagged ship Audacity of Hope in the humanitarian aid flotilla that aims to sail to Gaza this week, despite the Israeli naval blockade.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel continues to threaten a group of international activists planning to sail to Gaza this week with humanitarian aid. The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said participants in the 10-boat flotilla are seeking, quote, "confrontation and blood." Last year Israeli forces killed nine people aboard the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara. One of them was a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, activists say one of the 10 boats scheduled to set sail to Gaza has been sabotaged in a Greek port. Saboteurs reportedly cut off the propeller shaft of a ship shared by Swedish, Norwegian and Greek activists. Organizers say the boat will be repaired in time to sail to Gaza.

One of the other ships that will try to reach Gaza from Greece is The Audacity of Hope. It’s set to carry up to 50 U.S. citizens carrying letters to Gaza residents. One of the ship’s passengers is the acclaimed author, the poet, the activist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker. She’s written many books, among them, The Color Purple. On Monday, Alice Walker spoke at a Freedom Flotilla news conference in the Greek capital of Athens.

ALICE WALKER: My name is Alice Walker, and I am with the U.S. boat to Gaza and very happy to be a part of our delegation, which is very soulful and making wonderful sounds. And thank you very much. I am going to Gaza because my government has failed, it has failed us, it has failed to understand or to care about the Gazan people. But worse than that, our government is ignorant of our own history in the United States. For instance, when black people were enslaved for 300 years, it took a lot of people from outside of our communities to come to help free us. And also, during the period of the civil rights movement, which was 19—in the 1960s, again, it took people from outside of our own communities to come and help us free ourselves. This is a fine tradition of going to people who need us wherever they exist on the planet. This is our responsibility. This is what we are here for as human beings.

And so, I just would like to say that we are on our way, that Hillary Clinton may put up all of the protests that she likes, and she may say that we should not travel, that it is dangerous. We know it is dangerous. We know, for instance, that climate change is probably just as dangerous as getting on a boat to Gaza and that people should be paying attention to that, too.

I also feel that when our government, in the person of our president, can make a speech about this area, and really speak only to the Israelis and not to the Palestinians, this is unacceptable. We cannot accept this. I mean, we look at what has happened to the Palestinian people for all of these decades, and it is insufferable. We will not accept it. We will not. As Americans, with our history of enslavement of people, of segregation, of apartheid, of brutalization, of lynching, we will not accept this. We will not.

So, Gazans, and especially the children, we are on our way. We are coming. We hear you. We are coming.

And I look at you in this room, and I realize that this is what—you know, if we have a salvation as human kind, it is in this room. It is the people who have gathered here for what is one of the hardest tasks for us. This situation is one of the hardest on the planet, and it is up to us to try to solve it, to bring some comfort, to bring some light, because, otherwise, what chance do we have with all the other problems? I mean, we now have tornadoes that are a mile wide. There has to be somebody to help take care of things like Gaza, so that we will be strong enough to deal with tornadoes, earthquakes, floods. You know, this is our future. This is our present. This is our future. So, in a sense, if we work on these issues, you know, that we are beginning to see, I mean, we are freeing ourselves of the myths that have crippled us, but we’re beginning to see what is the truth. And if we can see what is the truth about this situation, we will free ourselves to work on the real issue for humanity, which is protecting earth. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, speaking Monday in Athens, Greece, at a Freedom Flotilla news conference. She is part of the delegation, the group of up to 50 passengers who hope to board the ship they have called The Audacity of Hope, named after President Obama’s famous book, the ship that they hope to sail to challenge the Israeli embargo of Gaza.

Alice Walker on Racism, Feminism, American History & Barack Obama

All,

The following courageous and very important statement by internationally renowned novelist, critic, feminist, journalist, poet, and activist Alice Walker is not only a profoundly honest and truthful declaration of her immense love, respect, and support for Barack Obama, but an incisive, passionate, and critical engagement with her white women friends, colleagues, and fellow feminists who Walker takes to task for the tragically myopic and racially chauvinist manner in which far too many of them have unfairly/unjustly treated the Obama campaign--and particularly the idea of a black male candidate for the Presidency. The intellectual and spiritual clarity of Ms. Walker's statement coupled with its sagacious and erudite political understanding of the actual reality and potential of the Obama phenomenon marks her deeply personal essay as one of her most important public statements in her long, distinguished career as writer and citizen. I reprint the statement below with both a keen sense of pride and deep appreciation for what Ms. Walker has selflessly given us.

Kofi


http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/bpeopleb-authors-purple-prose-for-stunning-obama/2008/04/01/1206850904451.html

http://www.theroot.com/id/45469

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/barackobama.uselections2008




Lest we Forget: An Open letter to my sisters who are brave
by Alice Walker

The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.

TheRoot.com

March 27, 2008

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.

The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.

When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.

Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.

We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Namaste;

And with all my love,

Alice Walker

Cazul

Northern California

First Day of Spring