Black, White, and Jewish

Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self is a 2002 memoir by Rebecca Walker. In this coming-of-age nonfiction book, Walker—the daughter of Alice Walker, the famed African-American novelist who wrote 1982’s The Color Purple, and Mel Leventhal, a Jewish man—recounts her highly confusing and tumultuous transition from adolescence into adulthood. As Walker catalogs her recollections of bouncing back and forth between two very different families—a white family in New York and a black family in San Francisco—the author crafts a unique meditation on race and identity in America.

At the start of the book, Walker presents her childhood in short, flickering bursts. She jumps between events both mundane and formative, like being fed chitterlings and chocolate on her first birthday, to reflect Walker’s feelings of having a fragmented, broken sense of identity. She also discusses the relative lack of supervision she enjoyed as a child and confesses to having mixed feelings about freedom. Owing to her wild actions as a child, Walker could easily be in prison right now, she writes; in fact she almost craves incarceration because it might help alleviate what Walker considers to be the stress of being free.

After this preface, the first section is titled, “Brooklyn,” and is made up largely of letters written by Walker to her mother and her babysitter, Louisa. At this time in her life, Walker’s parents—who, Walker tells us, own the distinction of being the first legally married interracial couple in the state of Mississippi—are still together but they often fight. Walker also introduces the reader to her Grandma Miriam on her father’s Jewish side of the family. Walker worries that her mother will disapprove of the way Grandma Miriam spoils her granddaughter. Perhaps what Walker should be more worried about, the author suggests in retrospect, is how she’s begun to pick up some of the prejudicial attitudes of Grandma Miriam without even realizing it.



Walker’s favorite relative on her father’s side is Uncle Jackie. In addition to “spoiling” his kids, relatively-speaking, Jackie has something in common with Walker, she writes: they are both outsiders, with Walker being biracial and Jackie having married a Catholic woman. Despite her strong relationship with Uncle Jackie, Walker’s hope for a unified identity and family are in jeopardy because she simply doesn’t believe her African-American mother is capable of getting along with even the best and most friendly members of her extended white Jewish family, like Jackie. During this period of her adolescence, Walker picks up a habit of hiding in a locked bathroom whenever possible.

Walker’s worries that her family may fall apart intensify when her mother stops sleeping with her father, opting instead to stay in Walker’s room each night where she regularly cries herself to sleep. When her parents separate for good, her father’s new wife moves into their current brownstone home while her mother is forced to move with Walker to her brother Bobby’s home in Atlanta. While Walker hopes that living with an all-black family will help reconcile her identity crisis, her hopes are dashed after her aunt refuses to add cornrows to Walker’s hair.

Eventually, Walker and her mother relocate to San Francisco where Walker, now in the sixth grade, begins to spend time with an older and wilder crowd. With her new friend Lena, Walker experiments with marijuana, alcohol, and sex. Before she even gets her first period, Walker visits Planned Parenthood and begins to take birth control pills. Before long, her parents decide Walker is better off living in New York with her father. But while that may be true from a behavioral standpoint, the move back East once again threatens to tear down the identity Walker has from her time out West. Now, instead of hanging out with black friends in impoverished areas of town, Walker is surrounded by white, upper-class Jewish youths. Walker tries to embrace the Jewish lifestyle by attending the bat mitzvah of her new best friend, Jodi Berman. But the ceremony, while lavish and impressive, fails to speak to Walker’s inner-self.



With little sense of belonging in her father’s Jewish community, Walker ventures to more impoverished areas and begins to consort largely with Latino friends who call her a “mulatto” but nevertheless accept her into their circle. As Walker’s comfort level with these new friends grows, her illicit activities begin to include not just marijuana and alcohol but harder drugs, including a mystery pill that makes her extremely frightened after taking it. The dealer responsible for providing the pill is found dead, and Walker suspects that her boyfriend, Ray, may be involved in his death.

After two years living with her father in the Bronx, Walker decides to move back in with her mother in San Francisco. She owes this decision not to the increased drama surrounding her friends and boyfriends, but her discomfort around her white father, white step-mother, and white step-sister. Walker is made particularly uncomfortable by the jealousy she feels toward her step-sister, whose sense of race and identity is less fragmented. Back in California, there is significant tension between Walker’s mother and the author, who is significantly changed by two years worth of experiences in New York. Nevertheless, Walker thrives in an African-American peer group where she finally feels she really belongs, and she has her mother to thank for this because of how Walker learned to dance and have “rhythm” from her mother. Walker also attracts the attention of many boys at her high school, including her new boyfriend, Michael. But before long, Walker becomes pregnant at the age of 14 and decides to get an abortion.

The abortion convinces her mother than Walker is best-served by joining a private school. There, Walker excels and is later admitted to Yale University, an Ivy League school. There, she develops a relationship with a white man named Andrew. She feels comfortable with Andrew and the white culture he represents until an episode in which one of his friends carelessly uses the n-word. Worse still, Andrew defends the friend. In the end, Walker looks back on this experience and others that make it so difficult for her to feel confident in her identity. So instead, Walker decides to accept a “shifting” sense of self for the rest of her days.



Through rich detail and striking candor, Walker’s experiences illuminate issues of race and identity in America that many of its citizens might never otherwise notice. As Publishers Weekly states in its review, “[Walker’s] artfulness in baring her psyche, spirit and sexuality will attract a wealth of deserved praise.”