On Being Alice Walker's Daughter

The Times reports on what it was like being the daughter (now estranged) of Alice Walker

[Alice]Walker, the eighth child of poor sharecroppers, grew up in Georgia during segregation. Her extraordinary intellect and determination won her a scholarship to study in New York; and after university she returned to the South and became involved in voter-registration drives and setting up children’s education programmes in Mississippi.

There she met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. In the midst of the feverish, sometimes murderous, racial politics of the time, they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi, defying both their families’ disapproval and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

The marriage did not last but it produced Rebecca: a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The problem was that, during her childhood, Rebecca felt precisely that — a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.

I resist drawing armchair conclusions, but already I smell the "ideological rat" so to speak. Ideology seems to me to be outright enemy of everything good in life. Even when it's approximately correct, ideologies become these insulating outfits that make relationships with anyone outside that ideology almost impossible. This is echo'd in the article, too. For instance,

Walker had also joined the early feminist movement — Gloria Steinem is Rebecca’s godmother — and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.

“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships,” says Rebecca.

As cold and non-romantic as it sounds, the best antidote for an overly ideological sensibility is science. That is, for ideological assertion and dogma to become self-critical and humbled through the tedious process of empirical falsification. This is hard to stomach, since ideologies are often adopted for reasons unrelated to evidence. They are more generally rooted in social networking, social capital and personal identity. People both accept and reject the ideological systems, oftentimes, for reasons unrelated to evidence.

That's one of the things I benefited from being an economist. As cynical as it's made me, as I've learned first hand positions are neither as perfect as they seem initially nor as draconian and evil either, I think Rebecca Walker came to a similar conclusion on her own:

Rebecca went to Yale anyway, and started thinking about feminism for herself. Her first book examined what feminism meant to young women and what role it played in the modern world. “When I began to challenge status quo feminism, my mother started to feel very injured,” she says. “To have a daughter who was questioning feminism — it was seen as a threat. Imagine Margaret Thatcher having a hippie child who wanted to live in India and become a Hare Krishna. It was that kind of schism.

“I keep telling people feminism is an experiment. And just like in science, you have to assess the outcome of the experiment and adjust according to your results, but my mother and her friends, they see it as truth; they don’t see it as an experiment.

“So that creates quite a problem. You’ve got young women saying, ‘That didn’t really work for me’ and the older ones saying, ‘Tough, because that’s how it should be’.”

“People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”