Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity -Adrienne Rich Adrienne Rich is one of America's leading poets, an essayist, and a committed feminist. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award in 1!" for #i$ing into the %reck. &n the following selection, from Blood, Bread, and oetry( )elected rose 1!-*+, Rich performs a kind of self-analysis y looking at the sources of her own di$ided identities in her eperiences growing up and seeing the world from too many disconnected angles( white, /ewish, anti-)emite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesian, middle-class, ematriate southerner, southerner, split at the roof )uggestion for Reading As you read, notice how Adrienne Rich analy0es her identity as split at the root, composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting sel$es. Annotate those passages where Arch identifies these $arious sel$es and their relations to each other.
or aout fifteen minutes & ha$e een ee n sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. 2rying 2rying to e honest ho nest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to e so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary. &t comes to me that in order to write this & ha$e to e willing to do two things( & ha$e to claim my father, for & ha$e my /ewishness from him and not from my gentile mother3 and & ha$e to reak his silence, his taoos3 in order to c laim him & ha$e in a sense to epose him. And there is, of course, the third thing( & ha$e to face the sources and the flickering presence of my own ami$alence as a /ew3 the daily, mundane anti-)emitisms of my entire life. 2hese are stories & ha$e ne$er tried to tell efore. %hy now4 %hy, & asked myself sometime last year, does this 5uestion of o f /ewish identity float so impalpaly, impalpaly, so ungraspaly around me, a cloud & can't 5uite see the outlines of, which feels to me to e without definition4 And yet &'$e een on the track of this longer than & think. &n a long poem written in 167, 1 67, when & was thirty-one years old, & descried. myself as )plit at the root, neither 8entile nor /ew,9:ankee /ew,9:ankee nor Reel.1 & was still trying to ha$e it oth ways( wa ys( to e neither9nor, trying to li$e ;with my /ewish husand and three children more /ewish in ancestry than &< in the predominantly gentile :ankee :ankee academic world of =amridge, >assachusetts. But this egins, for me, in Baltimore, where & was orn in my father's workplace, a hospital in the Black ghetto, whose loy contained an immense white marle statue of =hrist. >y father was then a young teacher and researcher in the department of pathology at the /ohns Hopkins >edical )chool, )cho ol, one of the $ery few /ews to attend or teach at that institution. He was from Birmingham, Alaama3 his father, )amuel, was Ashkena0ic, an 1
Adrienne Rich, Readings of History, in )napshots of' a #aughter-in-?aw ;New :ork( %. %. Norton, 16!<, pp. @+-"7.
immigrant from Austria-Hungary, and his mother, Hattie Rice, a ) ephardic /ew from icksurg, >ississippi. >y grandfather had had a shoe store in Birmingham, which did well enough to allow him to retire comfortaly and to lea$e my grandmother income on his death. 2he only sou$enirs of my grandfather, )amuel Rich, were his i$ory flute, which lay on our li$ing-room mantel and was not to e played with3 his thin gold pocket watch, which my father wore3 and his Herew prayer ook, which & disco$ered among my father's ooks in the course-of reading my way through his lirary. &n this prayer ook there was a newspaper clipping aout my grandparents' wedding, which took place in a synagogue. >y father, Arnold, was sent in adolescence to a military school in the North =arolina mountains, a place for training white southern =hristian gentlemen. & suspect that there were few, if any, other /ewish oys at =olonel Bingham's, or at >r. /efferson's uni$ersity in =harlottes$ille, where he studied as an und ergraduate. %ith whate$er conscious forethought, )amuel and Hattie sent their son into the dominant southern %A) culture to ecome an eception, to enter the professional class. Ne$er, in descriing these eperiences, did he speak of ha$ing suffered-from loneliness, cultural alienation, or outsiderhood. Ne$er did & hear him use the word anti-Semitism. &t was only in college, when & read a poem y arl )hapiro eginning 2o hate the Negro and a$oid the /ew 9 is the curriculum, that it flashed on me that there was-an untold side to my father's story of his student years. He looked recogni0aly /ewish, was short and slender in uild with dark wiry hair and deep-set eyes, high forehead and cur$ed nose. >y mother is a gentile. &n /ewish law & canno t count myself a /ew. &f it is true that we think ack through our mothers if we are women ;irginia %oolf<--and & myself ha$e affirmed this--then e$en according to lesian theory, & cannot ;or need not4< count myself a /ew. 2he white southern rotestant woman, the gentile, has always een there for me to peel ack into. 2hat's a whole piece of history in itself, for my gentile grandmother and my mother were also frustrated artists and intellectuals, a lost writer and a lost composer etween them. Readers and annotators of ooks, note takers, my mother a good pianist still, in her eighties. But there was also the osession with anc estry, with ackground, the southern talk of family, not as people you would necessarily know and depend on, ut as heritage, the guarantee of good reeding. 2here was the in$eterate romantic heteroseual fantasy, the mother telling the daughter how to attract men ;my mother often used the word fascinate<3 the assumption that relations etween the sees could only e romantic, that it was in the woman's interest to culti$ate mystery,C conceal her actual feelings. )ur$i$al tactics of a kind, & think today3 knowing what & know aout the white woman's seual role in the southern racist scenario. Heteroseuality as protection, ut also drawing white women deeper into collusion with white men. &t would e easy to push away and deny the gentile in me-that white southern woman, that social christian. At different times in my life & ha$e wanted to push away one or the other urden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. &f & call myself a /ewish lesian, do & therey try to shed some of my southern gentile white
woman's culpaility4 &f & call myself only through my mother, is it ecause & pass more easily through a world where eing a lesian often seems like outsiderhood enough4 According to Na0i logic, my two /ewish grandparents would ha$e made me a Mischling, first-degree-noneempt from the inal )olution. 2he social world in which & grew up was christian $irtually without needing to say so-christian imagery, music, language, symols, assumptions e$erywhere- &t was also a genteel, white, middle-class world in which common wa s a term of deep opprorium. =ommon white people might speak of niggers3 we were taught ne$er to use that word-we said Negroes ;e$en as we accepted segregation, the eating taoo, the assumption that Black people were simply of a separate species<. Dur language was more polite, distinguishing us from the rednecks or the lynch-mo mentality. But so charged with negati$e meaning was e$en the word Negro that as children we were taught ne$er to use it in front of Black people. %e were taught that any mention of skin color in the presence of colored people was treacherous, foridden ground. &n a parallel way, the word /ew was not used y polite gentiles. & sometimes heard my est friend's father, a resyterian minister, allude to the Herew people or people of the /ewish faith. 2he world of acceptale folk was white, gentile ;christian, really<, and had ideals ;which colored people, white common people, were not supposed to ha$e<. &deals and manners included not hurting someone's feelings y calling her or him a Negro or a /ew naming the hated identity. 2his is the mental framework of the 1@7s and 1"7s in which & was raised. ;%riting this, & feel dimly like the etrayer3 of my father, who did not speak the word3 of my mother, who must ha$e trained me in the messages3 of my caste and class3 of my whiteness itself.< Two memories: & am in a play reading at school of The Merchant of Venice. %hate$er /ewish law says, & am 5uite sure & was seen as /ewish ;with a reassuringly gentile mother< in that doule $ision that igotry allows. & am the only /ewish girl in the class, and & am playing ortia. As always, & read my part aloud for my father the night efore, and he tells me to con$ey, with my $oice, more scorn and contempt with the word /ew( 2herefore, /ew . . . & ha$e to say the word out, and say it loudly. & was encouraged to pretend to e a non-/ewish child acting a non-/ewish character who has to speak the word /ew emphatically. )uch a child would not ha$e had troule with the part. But I must ha$e had troule with the part, if only ecause the word itself was really taoo. & can see that there was a kind of terrile, itter ra$ado aout my father's way of handling this. And who would not dissociate from )hylock in order to identify with ortia4 As a /ewish child who was also a female, & lo$ed ortia-and, like e$ery other )hakespearean heroine, she pro$ed a treacherous role model. A year or so later & am in another play. The School for Scandal , in which a notorious spendthrift is descried as ha$ing many ecellent friends . . . among the /ews. &n neither case was anything eplained, either to me or to the class at large, aout this scorn for /ews and the disgust surrounding /ews and money. >oney, when /ews wanted it, had it, or lent it to others, seemed to take on a peculiar nastiness3 /ews and money had some peculiar and unspeakale relation. At this same school-in which we had Episcopalian hymns and prayers, and read aloud through the Bile morning after morning-& g ained the impression that /ews were in
the Bile and mentioned in English literature, that they had een persecuted centuries ago y the wicked &n5uisition, ut that they seemed not to eist in e$eryday life. 2hese were the 1"7s, and we were told a great deal aout the Battle of Britain, the nole rench Resistance fighters, the ra$e, star$ing #utch-ut & did not learn of the resistance of the %arsaw ghetto until & left home. & was sent to the Episcopal church, apti0ed and confirmed, and attended it for aout fi$e years, though without elief. 2hat religion seemed to ha$e little to do with elief or commitment3 it was liturgy that mattered, not spiritual passion. Neither of my parents e$er entered that church, and my father would not enter any church for any reason-wedding or funeral. Nor did & enter a synagogue until & left Baltimore. %hen & came home from church, for a while, my father insisted on reading aloud to me from 2homas aine's 2he Age of Reason-a diatrie against institutional religion. 2hus, he eplained, & would ha$e a alanced $iew of these things, a choice. He-they-did not gi$e me the choice to e a /ew. >y mother eplained to me when & was filling out forms for college that if any 5uestion was asked aout religion, & should put down Episcopalian rather than none-to seem to ha$e no religion was, she implied, dangerous. But it was white social christianity, rather than any particular christian sect, that the world was founded on. 2he $ery word Christian was used as a synonym for $irtuous, Fust, peace-lo$ing, generous, etc., etc.G 2he norm was christian( religion( none was indeed not acceptale. Anti-)emitism was so intrinsic as not to ha$e a name. & don't recall eactly eing taught that the /ews killed /esus-=hrist killer seems too strong a term for the land Episcopal $ocaulary-ut certainly we got the impression that the /ews had een caught out in a terrile mistake, failing to recogni0e the true >essiah, and were therey less ad$anced in moral and spiritual sensiility. 2he /ews had actually allowed moneylenders in the Temple ;again, the uneplained osession with /ews and money<. 2hey were of the past, archaic, primiti$e, as older ;and darker< cultures are supposed to e primiti$e3 christianity was lightness, fairness, peace on earth, and comined the feminine appeal of 2he meek shall inherit the earth with the masculine stride of Dnward, =hristian )oldiers. )ometime in 1"6, while still in high school, & read in the newspaper that a theater in Baltimore was showing films of the Allied lieration of the Na0i concentration camps. Alone, & went downtown after school one afternoon and watched the stark, lurry, ut unmistakale newsreels. %hen & try to go ack and touch the pulse of that girl of siteen, growing up in many ways so precocious and so ignorant, & am o$erwhelmed y a memory of despair, a sense of ine$itaility more en$eloping than any & had e$er known. Anne rank's diary and many other personal narrati$es of the Holocaust were still unknown or unwritten. But it came to me that e$ery one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, indi$iduals, who had elie$ed, as & now elie$ed of myself, that they were intended to li$e out a life of some kind of meaning, that the world possessed some kind of sense and order3 yet this had happened to them. And &, who elie$ed my life was intended to e so interesting and meaningful, was connected to those dead y something-not Fust mortality ut a taoo name, a hated identity. Dr was &-did & really ha$e to e4 %riting this now, & feel elated rage that & was G
&n a similar way the phrase 2hat's white of you implied that you were eha$ing with the superior decency and morality epected of white ut not of Black people.
so impo$erished y the family and social worlds & li$ed in, that & had to try to figure out y myself what this did indeed mean for me. 2hat & had ne$er een taught aout resistance, only aout passing. 2hat & had no language for anti-)emitism itself. %hen & went home and told my parents where & had een, they were not pleased. & felt accused of eing moridly curious, not healthy, sniffing around death for the thrill of it. And since, at siteen, & was often not sure of the sources of my feelings or of my moti$es for doing what & did, & proaly accused myself as well. Dne thing was clear( there was noody in my world with whom & could discuss those films. roaly at the same time, & was reading accounts of the camps in maga0ines and newspapers3 what & rememer were the films and ha$ing 5uestions that & could not e$en phrase, such as Are those men and women them or !s" 2o e ale to ask e$en the child's astonished 5uestion #hy do they hate !s so4 means knowing how to say we. 2he guilt of not knowing, the guilt of perhaps ha$ing etrayed my parents or e$en those $ictims, those sur$i$ors, through mere curiosity-these also fro0e in me for years the impulse to find out more aout the Holocaust. 1"!( & left Baltimore to go to college in =amridge, >assachusetts, left ;& thought< the ackward, ener$ating )outh for the intellectual, $ital North. New England also had for me some $iration of higher moral rectitude, of moral passion e$en, with its se$enteenth century uritan self-scrutiny, its nineteenth-century literary flowering, its aolitionist righteousness, =olonel )haw and his Black =i$il %ar regiment depicted in granite on Boston =ommon. At the same time, & found myself, at Radcliffe, among /ewish women( & used to sit for hours o$er co ffee with what & thought of as the real /ewish students, who told me aout middle-class /ewish culture in America. & descried my ackground-for the first time to strangers-and they took me on, some with amusement at my illiteracy, some arguing that & could ne$er marry into a strict /ewish family, some con$inced & didn't look /ewish, others that & did. & learned the names of holidays and foods, which surnames are /ewish and which are changed names3 aout girls who had had their noses fied, their hair straightened. or these young /ewish women, students in the late 1"7s, it was acceptale, perhaps e$en necessary, to stri$e to look as gentile as possile3 ut they stuck proudly to eing /ewish, epected to marry a /ew, ha$e children, keep the holidays, carry on the culture. & felt & was testing a foridden current, that there was danger in these re$elations. & ought a reproduction of a =hagall portrait of a rai in striped prayer shawl and hung it on the wall of my room. & was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, ut & was also doing something that is dangerous( & was flirting with identity. Dne day that year & was in a small shop where & had ought a dress with a toolong skirt. 2he shop employed a seamstress who did alterations, and she came in to pin up the skirt on me. & am sure that she was a recent immigrant, a sur$i$or. & rememer a short, dark woman wearing hea$y glasses, with an accent so foreign & could not understand her words. )omething aout her presence was $ery powerful and disturing to me. After marking and pinning up the skirt, she sat ack on her knees, looked up at me, and asked in a hurried whisper( :ou /ewish4 Eighteen years of training in assimilation sprang into the refle y which & shook my head, reFecting her, and muttered, No.
%hat was & actually saying no to4 )he was poor, older, struggling with a foreign tongue, anious3 she had escaped the death that had een intended for her, ut & had no imagination of her possile courage and foresight, her resistance-& did not see in her a heroine who had perhaps sa$ed many li$es, including her own. & saw the frightened immigrant, the seamstress hemming the skirts of college girls, the wandering /ew. But & was an American college girl ha$ing her skirt hemmed. And & was frightened myself, & think, ecause she had recogni0ed me ;&t takes one to know one, my friend Edie at Radcliffe had said< e$en if & refused to recogni0e myself or her, e$en if her recognition was sharpened y loneliness or the need to feel safe with me. But why should she ha$e felt safe with me4 & myself was li$ing with a false sense of safety. 2here are etrayals in my life that & ha$e known at the $ery moment were etrayals( this was one of them. 2here are other etrayals committed so repeatedly, so mundanely, that they lea$e no memory trace ehind, o nly a growing residue of misery, of dull, accreted self-hatred. Dften these take the form not of words ut of silence. )ilence efore the Foke at which e$eryone is laughing3 the anti-woman Foke, the racist Foke, the anti-)emitic Foke. )ilence and then amnesia. Blocking it out when the oppressor's language starts coming from the lips of one we admire, whose courage and elo5uence ha$e touched us( She didn$t really mean that; he didn$t really say that% But the accretions uild up out of sight, like seal, inside a kettle. 1"*( & come home from my freshman year at college, flaming with new insights, new information. & am the daughter who has gone out into the world, to the pinnacle of intellectual prestige, Har$ard, fulfilling my father's hopes for me, ut also eposed to dangerous influences. & ha$e already een repro$ed for attending a rally for him, %allace and the rogressi$e party. & challenge my father( %hy ha$en't you told me that & am /ewish4 %hy do you ne$er talk aout eing a /ew4 He answers measuraly, :ou know that & ha$e ne$er denied that & am a /ew. But it's not important to me. & am a scientist, a deist. & ha$e no use for organi0ed religion. & choose to li$e in a world of many kinds of people. 2here are /ews & admire and others who & despise. & am a person, not simply a /ew. 2he words are as & rememer them, not perhaps eactly as spoken. But that was the message. And it contained enough truth-as all denial drugs itself on partial truth-so that it remained for the time eing unanswerale, lea$ing me high and dry, split at the root, gasping for clarity, for air. At that time Arnold Rich was li$ing in suspension, waiting to e appointed to the professorship of pathology at /ohns Hopkins. 2he appointment was delayed for years, no /ew e$er ha$ing held a professional chair in that medical school. And he wanted it adly. it must ha$e een a $ery itter time for him, since he had elie$ed so greatly in the redeeming power of ecellence, of eing the most rilliant, inspired man for the Fo. %ith enough ecellence, you could presumaly make it stop mattering that you were /ewish3 you could ecome the only /ew in the gentile world, a /ew so ci$ili0ed, so far from common, so attracti$ely comining southern gentility with European cultural $alues that no one would e$er confuse you with the raw, pushy /ew of New :ork, the loud, hysterical refugees from eastern Europe, the o$erdressed /ews of the uran )outh.
%e-my sister, mother, and &-were constantly urged to speak 5uietly in pulic, to dress without ostentation, to repress all $i$idness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamoyant. & suppose that my mother, pure gentile though she was, could e seen as acting common or /ewish if she laughed too loudly or spoke aggressi$ely. >y fathers mother, who li$ed with us half the year, was a model of circumspect eha$ior, dressed in dark lue or la$ender, retiring in company, ladylike to an etreme, wearing no Fewelry ecept a good gold chain, a narrow rooch, or a string of pearls. A few times, within the family, & saw her anger flare, felt the passion she was repressing. But when Arnold took us out to a restaurant or on a trip, the Rich women were always turned down to some %A) le$el my father elie$ed, surely, would protect us all-maye also make us unrecogni0ale to the real /ews who wanted to sei0e us, drag us ack to the shtetl , the ghetto, in its many manifestations. or, yes, that was a message-that some /ews would e after you, once they knew, to reFoin them, tore-enter a world that was messy, noisy, unpredictale, maye poor-e$en though, as my mother once wrote me, critici0ing my largely /ewish choice of friends in college, some of them will e the most rilliant, fascinating people you'll e$er meet. & wonder if that isn't one message of assimilation--of America-that the unlucky or the unachie$ing want to pull you ackward, that to identify with them is to court downward moility, lose the precious chance of passing, of token eistence. 2here was always within this sense of /ewish identity a strong class discrimination. /ews might e fascinating as indi$iduals ut came with huge unruly families who poured chicken soup o$er e$eryone's head ;in the phrase of a white southern male poet<. Anti-)emitism could thus e Fustified y the ad eha$ior of certain /ews3 and if you did not effecti$ely deny family and community, there would always e a remote cousin claiming kinship with you who was the wrong kind of /ew. I ha&e always belie&ed his attit!de toward other 'ews depended on who they were%%%% It was my impression that 'ews of this bac(gro!nd loo(ed down on )astern )!ropean 'ews, incl!ding *olish 'ews and +!ssian 'ews, who generally were not as well ed!cated% 2his from a letter written to me recently y a gentile who had worked in my father's department, whom & had asked aout anti-)emitism there and in particular regarding my father. 2his informant also wrote me that it was hard to percei$e anti)emitism in Baltimore ecause the racism made so much more intense an impression( I wo!ld almost ha&e to thin( that blac(s went to a different hea&en than the whites, beca!se the bodies were (ept in a separate morg!e, and some white persons did not e&en want blood transf!sions from blac( donors% >y father's mind was predictaly racist and misogynist3 yet as a medical student he noted in his Fournal that southern male chi$alry stopped at the point of any white man in a streetcar gi$ing his seat to an old, weary Black woman standing in the aisle. %as this a /ewish insight-an outsiders insight, e$en though the outsider was stri$ing to e on the inside4 Because what isn't named is often more permeating than what is, & elie$e that my father's /ewishness profoundly shaped my own identity and our family eistence. 2hey were shaped oth y eternal anti-)emitism and my father's self-hatred, and y his /ewish pride. %hat Arnold did, & think was call his /ewish pride something else( achie$ement, aspiration, genius, idealism. %hate$er was unacceptale got left ack under the ruric of /ewishness or the wrong kind of /ews-uneducated, aggressi$e, loud. 2he message & got was that we were really superior( noody else's father had collected so
many ooks, had tra$eled so far, knew so many languages. Baltimore was a musical city, ut for the most part, in the families of my school friends, culture was for women. >y father was an amateur musician, read poetry, adored encyclopedic knowledge. He prowled and pounced o$er my school papers, insisting & use grownup sources3 he critici0ed my poems for faulty techni5ue and ga$e me ooks on rhyme and meter and form. His in$estment in my intellect and talent was egotistical, tyrannical, opinionated, and terrily wearing. He taught me, ne$ertheless, to elie$e in hard work, to mistrust easy inspiration, to write and rewrite3 to feel that & was a person of the ook, e$en though a woman3 to take ideas seriously. He made me feel, at a $ery young age, the power of language and that & could share in it. 2he Riches were proud, ut we also had to e $ery careful. Dur eha$ior had to e more impeccale than other peoples. )trangers were not to e trusted, nor e$en friends3 family issues must ne$er go eyond the family3 the world was full of potential slanderers, etrayers, people who co!ld not !nderstand . E$en within the family, & reali0e that & ne$er in my whole life knew what my father was really feeling. :et he spokemonologued-with dri$ing intensity. :ou could grow up in such a house mesmeri0ed y the local electricity, the crucial meanings assumed y the merest things. 2his used to seem to me a sign that we were all li$ing on some high emotional plane. &t was a difficult force field for a fa$ored daughter to disengage from. Easy to call that intensity /ewish3 and & ha$e no dout that passion is one of the 5ualities re5uired for sur$i$al o$er generations of persecution. But what happens when passion is rent from its original ase, when the white gentile world is softly saying IBe more like us and you can e almost one of us4 %hat happens when sur$i$al seems to mean dosing off one emotional artery after another4 His foreears in Europe had een foridden to tra$el or epelled from one country after another, had special taes le$ied on them if they left the city walls, had een forced to wear special clothes and adges, restricted to the poorest neighorhoods. He had wanted to e a free spirit, to tra$el widely, among all kinds of people. :et in his prime of life he li$ed in air increasingly withdrawn world, in his house up on a hill in a neighorhood where /ews were not supposed to e ale to uy property, depending almost eclusi$ely on interactions with his wife and daughters to pro$ide emotional connectedness. &n his home, he created a pri$ate defense system so elaorate that e$en as he was dying, my mother felt unale to talk freely with his colleagues or others who might ha$e helped her. Df course, she ac5uiesced in this. 2he loneliness of the only, the token, often doesn't feel like loneliness ut like a kind of dead echo chamer. =ertain things that ought to dont resonate. )omewhere Be$erly )mith writes of women of color inspiring the eha $ior in each other. %hen there's noody to inspire the eha$ior, act out of the culture, there is an atrophy, a dwindling, which is partly in$isile.... )ometimes & feel & ha$e seen too long from too many disconnected angles( white, /ewish, anti-)emite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesian, middle-class, feminist, ematriate southerner, split at the root that & will ne$er ring them whole & would ha$e liked, in this essay, to ring together the meanings of anti-)emitism and racism as & ha$e eperienced them and as & elie$e they intersect in the world eyond my life. But &'m not ale to do this yet. & feel the tension as & think, make notes( If yo! really loo( at the one
reality, the other will wa&er and disperse% 2rying in one week to read Angela #a$is and ?ucy #a$idowic0,@ trying to hold throughout to a feminist, a lesian, perspecti$e-what does this mean4 Nothing has trained me for this. And sometimes & feel inade5uate to make any statement as a /ew3 & feel the history of denial within me like an inFury, a scar. or assimilation has affected my perceptions3 those early lapses in meaning, those lanks, are with me still. >y ignorance can e dangerous to me and to others. :et we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us3 we can't wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. 2here is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process. 2his essay, then, has no conclusions( it is another eginning for me. Not Fust a way of saying, in 1*G Right %ing America, I too, will wear the yellow star . &t's a mo$ing into accountaility, enlarging the range of accountaility. & know that in the rest of my life, the net half century or so, e$ery aspect of my identity will ha$e to e engaged. 2he middleclass white girl taught to trade oedience for pri$ilege. 2he /ewish lesian raised to e a heteroseual gentile. 2he woman who first heard oppression named and analy0ed in the Black =i$il Rights struggle. 2he woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male $iolence. 2he woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped leeding are also accountale. 2he poet who knows that eautiful language can lie, that the oppressor's language sometimes sounds eautiful. 2he woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act. )uggestions for #iscussion 1 Adrienne Rich suggests that what we eperience as our self is ne$e r a whole, formed independently, ut rather-is always multiple and di$ided, formed in relation to other people in a society that is di$ided y preFudice. Eplain how Rich analy0es her di$ided identities as relations to others. %hat conflicts arise from these relations4 G Rich's father plays a prominent part in her personal reminiscence. Eplain his role in her di$ided consciousness. %hat might ha$e led him to deny his /ewish heritage4 %hat do you see as the personal costs4 @ Rich notes the white woman's role in the southern racist scenario ut doesn't really de$elop the idea at any length. %hat, do you think, is she pointing to here4 %hat does Rich mean y the in$eterate romantic heteroseual fantasy4 How might this draw white women deeper into collusion with white men in maintaining racial hierarchies4
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Angela :. #a$is, %oman, Race and =lass ;New :ork( Random House, 1*1<3 ?ucy ). #a$idowic0. 2he %ar against the /ews 1@@-1"+ ;1!+3 New :ork( Bantam, 1!<.
