Dear EBH and DGW

Dear Evelyn B. Higginbotham and Deborah G. White:

Thank you for putting into words why the world needs The Color Purple.

Growing up in NYC, I started to hear debasing calls, calls that were once solely directed at my mother when I was with her, directed at me when I first began walking to school by myself in the 5th grade. Young and uncomfortable, I quickly learned to hasten my step and to avoid making contact with these men who frightened me.

But the more I grew older, the more I felt alienated from members of my own race. Noticing that, time and time again, older black men were disproportionately making advances toward me, I felt cornered into a behavior that, cerebrally, I had always rejected. After sneeringly being told by a black homeless man how much he wanted to f*** me (I was in 7th grade), I followed my mom's words of advice -- to put my security before my resistance against buying into a racial stereotype.

And that, despite my activism, precipitated a form of cognitive dissonance that I believed I would have to learn how to maintain. From feeling my ancestors made "whole" again during discussions of black oppression in the classroom to hoping that I wouldn't be catcalled as I walked past black men loitering on the streets, I desperately wanted to turn the latter instinct off, but instead only felt vexed by their continual actions. "Why are these strangers belittling me? Don't they know I'm on their team?"

And so perhaps this is why the world needs literature like The Color Purple -- to tell the story of how racial "unity" obscures the realities of black heterogeneity and intragroup hierarchy and mistreatment (Higginbotham, 270). As your pieces have shown me, "romanticized racialism" has failed to recognize the sundry identities and power structures that exist among blackness itself. Thinking of myself in terms of race rather than in terms of sex, I had felt ashamed for feeling alienated by the actions of members of my own racial group, when, in reality, I was veritably being oppressed under an intraracial hierarchy. The point in Sofia fighting against Harper's attempts to abuse her isn't to demonstrate her success in combatting any black person -- the point is demonstrated in how she evinces her strength as she comes to bat against her man. Though this message was of course clear to me while reading The Color Purple, I had never considered, until I read your articles, how intraracial sexism has operated in my own life.

So thank you again. Your pieces have helped to elucidate a piece of my own experience.

Sincerely,
Eliane