Speaker Discusses Race Issues

"We are all performing our racial and cultural identities all the time," she said. "We are performing blackness, we are performing whiteness, we are performing Latino-ness - but who are we? Who am I?"

Walker, the keynote speaker for Race Relations Week, attracted 225 people to a Monday evening speech about her experiences as a biracial female growing up in a racially divided society.

Sponsored by Students for the Advancement of Race Relations and other campus organizations, members of the committee began planning the event and discussing the possibility of her involvement back in August.

Cassandra Davis, co-chairwoman of SARR, said Walker was a natural choice to represent Race Relations week.

"So many different groups are interested in what she had to say," she said.

Lisa Garmon, who works at the Carolina Women's Center and attended the speech, said she was interested in how race, class and gender mix.

"(Walker) is very articulate and well-spoken," she said. "I loved her voice -- it was like prose poetry to me."

Born in 1969 to Alice Walker, the author of "The Color Purple," and a white, Jewish civil rights lawyer, Walker grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement of the 1970s.

She portrays her experiences growing up in an activist climate and her struggle to find her identity in her first novel "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self."

In her speech, Walker read from her work and spoke about the importance of identifying oneself with more than racial, gender and societal roles.

"We often define ourselves as people in reaction to a lot of historical repression," Walker said. "I think we can get very stuck in that identity ... in that rage.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a script -- a script that is not open to the present because (it's) so locked in the past."

To illustrate this idea, Walker gave an example from her own life.

"When I went to college, I became super-activist," Walker said. "I became very militant. ... Underneath a lot of the anger was this real insecurity, and when I got to college, the safest role was to play the activist -- the angry young woman. But it didn't allow me to connect with people."

Now, several years later, Walker finds herself connecting with people all over the world as audience members leave her lectures with a new perspective.

"What I am suggesting is that we be much more conscious of the way we're imbibing these identities ... and that we understand that that is not the totality of who we are."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.