[.ca] Black White And Jewish (ISBN 1573229075)

Rich teenagers are the angriest:
I picked up this book thinking it would be about being Black, White and Jewish, and found, instead, that it is about being Rebecca Walker, the privileged yet neglected child of divorced bi-costal parents. It is amazing that someone from two highly educated and idealistic parents, with her own incredible education, would have so little introspection into the parts of her identity that she claims to celebrate. Like many materially privileged yet emotionally neglected adolescents, Rebecca Walker is angry about all the wrong things. She has written a book that is really about being the daughter of an incredibly self-involved woman, and the dangers that self-involved parenting presents to young people. She has also written about the incredible financial and class advantages that she has been offered. However, she resents her privileges and celebrates her mother's neglect. She does not even seem to be able to understand her privilege, and comes off as little more than a spoiled and angry teenager, lashing out at her father and stepmother, who provided the most caring homelife she knew. At the writing of this book, Rebecca Walker was in her early thirties, and shows that, emotionally, she has progressed little towards being an adult. This is not a result of being Black, White and Jewish so much as it is a result of money and trips around the world replacing parental nurturing. The author's sole sense of white, Jewish identity seems to be based in being a member of the suburban upper-middle class. The title of her book seems to imply that this is what it means to be a White person or a Jewish person. Likewise, she seems to suggest that being a Black person is based on having big hips and "ghetto" attitude. It is shameful that anyone should think these identities are defined by shallow stereotypes like this, and especially disturbing that someone of such intellectual advantages is unable to see how limiting these ideas are to personal growth. As a Jewish person in a biracial family, I found it demeaning to be associated with these simplistic markers of identity. Likewise, as someone who grew up without financial advantage, I found it infuriating that the book never examines the coast-to-coast flights, expensive summer camps, and vacations in other countries as anything more than a common growing up experience. This book might be fine if it claimed to be something else- if it admitted that it was about being the child of wealthy professional parents who lived extrememly different lives. It is not a book about racial and cultural identity so much as it is a portrait of a certain class lifestyle, either the wealthy and cnservative or the wealthy and bohemian, depending on the parent. Rebecca Walker attended an elite high school and university, and has now chosen the life of an academic and writer. She has a lot more learning to do about the real factors that shaped her life, but, surrounding herself wih people of equal privilege, she may never be challenged to do so.

Self-Indulgent Drivel:
If someone were considering making it illegal to write a memoir before the age of, say, 60, Rebecca Walker's book, Black, White and Jewish, would be held up as a prime example. In this book, Walker recounts her childhood and teenage years as a daughter of a black mother, and white and Jewish father, and describes her struggle to find a sense of identity in a world that insisted that her cultural combination was a virtual impossibility. It is a compelling premise, but you'll be sorely disappointed if you're expecting an insightful reflection upon Walker's experiences growing up as a biracial Jewish child from the perspective of her adult self. The book is more of an adolescent diatribe about every sad, frustrating and/or confusing thing that happened to her before she graduated from high school. Yes, there was lots of confusing stuff. Her parents (divorced, estranged, and wildly inattentive to young Walker) made the unfathomable decision to have her alternate living between the two of them every two years, even though they lived on opposite sides of the country. So, just as Walker was settling into her identity with her black mother, or white Jewish father, she was whisked away to the opposite coast with a totally different peer group to start again. While one might have some stirrings of sympathy for her plight, the book's twin tones of self-pity and self-congratulation gets mighty tiresome. Fast. One gets the impression that by merely by surviving a complicated childhood, Walker thinks she performed some kind of feat that had no one else has done before. Moreover, most of the feelings of isolation and confusion she seems to embrace as uniquely hers will be recognized as entirely common to most American teenagers, whether biracial or not. I might have been able to forgive Walker for the invariable whine in her voice had she delivered any message more penetrating than 'it's tough to be a biracial/Jewish child of divorce.' I waited to see Walker become a grown-up, to rise above the childish insistence that the whole world understand her, and to divine and share some meaningful wisdom from her experiences. Didn't happen. If Walker has changed substantially from the self-centered, insecure teenager that she was, it's not obvious from her memoir. The reader is left to wonder how, if at all, she bridges her two worlds. Is she still "ashamed," as she puts it, of her white side? How does she think her childhood squares up against the experiences of other biracial children she's met, particularly those whose parents did not divorce, or at least remained amicable? What kind of advice or message would she give a biracial child that is struggling with his/her identity? What advice would she give to parents of a biracial child? Questions such as these are much more interesting and enlightening than a description of her first blow-job, or the names of the songs she listened to in junior high school. Walker's writing is fluid, and so, in that sense, the book is quite readable. And the contrast she offers of her antithetical worlds is vivid, packed with enough cultural details of the '80s to choke a hog. But, she seemed to be wrestling with something too big for her. She chooses a rather inapt central metaphor - her lack of memory - for a memoir. The first sentence of the book is: "I don't remember things" but then she spends the rest of the book spelling out every minor physical detail of her childhood and teenage years, starting from age 1. As a result, the memory theme feels embarrassingly contrived. (As do many of the pseudo-poetic musings she sprinkles throughout the book, like when some drunk barges into her Yale dorm room and asks how it can be possible that she's black and Jewish, she stares in the mirror and broods: 'Am I possible?' Girl, get over yourself.) In addition, she spends almost no time at all fleshing out the characters of those people who, for better or worse, influenced her life. She tosses everyone into simplistic categories - her Jewish grandmother was Racist, her mother was Uninvolved, her father Didn't Understand, the black men she met all had Beautiful Brown Skin, her white cousins had Hidden Racist Tendencies, etc. - and thus they all remain lifeless as cardboard cut-outs. Her willingness to cast the villains of her story in an unwavering negative light made me not fully trust her judgment and observations. For all the "honesty" that is supposedly bandied about in the book, I'd have trusted her view much more if she had managed to portray those who disappointed her as flawed humans with complex motivations and intentions instead of writing them off as Bad People. To me, that would be a hallmark of maturity. I could go on and on, but other disgruntled readers have hit what I've left out. Particularly the person who wrote about how she horribly oversimplifies - and renders superficial - what it means to be black, and what it means to be Jewish. The book really seemed to be a personal catharsis rather than a vehicle for sharing mature insight on the multicultural experience in America. Now that she has gotten to purge some of her bitterness at the expense of the reader, perhaps she can finally grow up. Maybe by the time she turns 60 she'll have learned enough to write a truly illuminating memoir that is for the reader, not for herself.

Only Good for the Dish on Alice!:
Like many others have said below, boring, shallow, and only published because she is the daughter of the famous writer Alice Walker. The only redeeming feature of the book is the delicious dish on her mother. My goodness, Alice Walker certainly lives up to every horrible stereotype of the self-involved second wave feminist. The details invite a reappraisal of the meeting of the personal and the political in certain strands of feminist lit. In this sense, the book needs to be read as the latest installment, albeit somewhat less glamourous, of the ungrateful daughter's nasty tell-all genre, a la Christina Crawford and B.D. Hyman (daughter of Bette Davis). More useful as tabloid material for eggheads rather than general enlightenment.

Leave the writing to her mother:
Blah blah blah! Sorry, but I was expecting so much more. Maybe I went into this book with a larger expectation for Rebecca, but this is anything but an inspiring story but more of a multi cultural child whining that she had to move a lot. Welcome to the melting pot of America, Rebecca! Be grateful :) Besides the Americana references, dont bother with this one.

Delighted and Disappointed...:
While I was moved almost to the point of tears on several occasions upon reading Walker's novel, I was disappointed with the end. It seems Rebecca has yet to come to terms with her "Shifting self". Walker writes about how she was able to weave in and out of two radically different worlds (the world of her black mother and free-living San Francisco culture, to the world of the white upper middle class New York suburb Jewish culture). She explores the way in which she adapted almost completely to one or the other culture whenever it was needed or expected. However, rather than coming to terms with her rich bi-racial and colorful cultural background and integrating both of these into forming her own unique identity, in my opinion Rebecca chose one identity over the other. Legally changing her name and thus further suppressing her identity from any resemblance of her Jewish and white background deeply saddened me. Although difficult, there are ways of incorporating aspects of both identities into one self - despite the state of racial animosity we live under in this country, both her parents were clearly able to do so. It is clear that Rebecca felt a distinct resentment toward her father and the eventual life he chose to lead; however, as a Jewish American I could not help but feel disappointed that Rebecca chose to identify with one side of her oppressed bi-racial identity over the other. She describes the life of her father, stepmother, half siblings and the culture of Larchmont, NY as privileged, wealthy, racist and generally homogeneous. While all of this may very well be close to the truth, what about being Jewish? What about all of the baggage that goes along with being a religious minority, the legacy of the Holocaust, the anti-Semitism everywhere in this world - what about that struggle? Rebecca seems to clump the "white" experiences of her life into offensive stereotypes of Jewish summer camp, and generalized stereotypes of growing up in suburban NY. She remembers those experiences as so much more of an outsider than the "black" experiences she remembers. In response to a previous review, someone wrote, "the key for me in understanding is that she cannot and will not be contained by neat categories." I could not disagree more with this after finishing this book. Walker is almost all about neat categories particularly when it comes to her "whiteness". Rather than drawing on the unique and rich history and background of her Jewish white self - she tends to wrap that side of her up into neat stereotypes. If I were to analyze her "shifting self" based on reading this book, I would say that it is this process and denial that contributes to, if not causes her confusion as a bi-racial woman and the arduous struggle she recalls in forming and constructing her identity. All of that said, I cannot help but love this book, as completely opposite as that sounds. Walker's writing is poetic, moving and draws the reader into a world that even if unfamiliar casts a spiritual light on the struggle of bi-racialism in America. I find myself wanting to know everything about Ms. Rebecca Walker after reading this, combing the internet for scraps of information about her life and what she has done since the writing of Black, White and Jewish. I highly recommend this book