Why Is Alice Walker Considered An Activist

Alice Walker is a dedicated activist and she stands for causes that she has experienced directly. In turn, those experiences and personal situations have impacted her writing topics and style. In her writings, past and current, the conflicts that she writes about are a direct reflection of her life. Alice Walker grew up in the south, in poverty and during a period of time that saw the ‘legal’ end of racism but the spirit of racism continued to live on. The struggle to overcome the obstacles she grew up in inspired her to be both an activist and writer. Alice Walker uses language through speech and written word to battle a society that she sees as bent on using race and gender as ways to dominate black woman and suppress minorities, both in
The same cultural identity problem facing Dee is similar for Myrna in “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?” She describes herself as having hands like “Helena Rubinstein” (Helena Rubinstein was a white woman who founded a cosmetics empire) and how she can indulge herself (Walker). Then Myrna goes on to describe how her husband sees her, “He (Ruel) married me because although my skin is brown he thinks I look like a French woman. Sometimes he tells me I look oriental: Korean or Japanese” (Walker). Alice Walker has Dee blind to the fact that she has cut herself off from her own culture and heritage but Myrna is angry. Myrna goes along with her husband’s wishes pretending to deny her cultural connection passively but Walker has Myrna demonstrate her underlying anger later. The external conflict has Dee and Myrna having difficulty fitting into the female roles based on Southern tradition but in Dee’s favor she has broken out of the mold. When Mama reflects on the fire that burned down their home, she remembers Dee “standing off under the sweet gum tree…(Mama thought) Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much” (Walker). Mama knew that “At sixteen she (Dee) had a
The language of both stories is descriptive and picturesque to draw the reader in with the words so that we can empathize, sympathize and have compassion for the dilemma of the characters. In “Everyday Use” Dee tries to wear the pretense of cultural pride, like the clothing she wears to the visit, to convince her mother and sister to give her what she wants. Dee wants the quilts and feels that she is entitled to take them because she has selfishly, in the past gotten her way. This time things don’t go her way, Dee’s veneer of cultural pride is quickly discarded and her true feelings of superiority (self-racism) come to the fore. She clearly thinks highly of herself and has no problem expressing the disdain that she feels for Maggie. Dee is now loud, garish and judgmental when she shouts at her mother that “Maggie can’t appreciate the quilts...she’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker). It is hard to feel empathy for Dee when she drives off but Maggie and Mama are content with their identity and roles in their world. To the contrast of Myrna, in “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay”, uses retribution as her primary motivator for living. She lives her life in the hope that by acting passively, Ruel will eventually let her leave. She thinks that if “I wait, beautiful and perfect in every limb, cooking supper as if my life depended on it, lying unresisting on his bed like a drowned body