To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism
(A revolutionary exploration of the nature of feminism tod...)
A revolutionary exploration of the nature of feminism today, its impact on everyday life, and its promise for the future. Determined to extend the boundaries of feminism to embrace social, political and economic equality for all humanity, these exciting young activists and thinkers recast the concepts of feminism to reflect their own experiences and beliefs. Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, they fearlessly describe their liberation from the feminist ideals that conflict with the reality of who they are, expose shocking secrets, and acknowledge long-hidden accommodations and anomalies.
Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
(In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define...)
In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.
Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence
(In this very smart memoir, Walker explores some of the la...)
In this very smart memoir, Walker explores some of the larger sociological trends of her generation while delivering her own story about the emotional and intellectual transformation that led her to motherhood.
One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Polyamory, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love
(Edited by bestselling writer Rebecca Walker, this fascina...)
Edited by bestselling writer Rebecca Walker, this fascinating exploration of today's American family features essays by prominent voices such as Z.Z. Packer, Dan Savage, Min Jin Lee, Asha Bandele, Neal Pollack, and others, on subjects such as open marriages, polyamory, single motherhood, parenting a disabled child, home schooling, and more.
Rebecca Walker is an American activist, feminist, lecturer, editor, and award-winning writer. Her writing, teaching, and speeches focus on race, gender, politics, power, and culture.
Besides, Walker has been regarded as one of the prominent voices of Third Wave Feminism. In 1994 "Time" named Walker as one of the 50 future leaders of America.
Background
Ethnicity:
Rebecca Walker's mother is an African-American woman, while her father is a Jewish American man. However, Walker identifies as black, white, and Jewish.
Rebecca Walker was born as Rebecca Leventhal on November 17, 1969, in Jackson, Mississippi, United States. She is the daughter of Alice Walker, an African-American Pulitzer-prize winning writer whose work includes The Color Purple, and Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, who is Jewish American and a civil rights attorney. Her parents married on March 17, 1967, in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi to work in civil rights, becoming “the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Klu Klux Klan.
After her parents divorced amicably in 1976, Walker spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father's home in the largely Jewish Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City and her mother's largely African-American environment in San Francisco.
When she was 15, she decided to change her surname from Leventhal to Walker, her mother's surname.
Education
Rebecca Walker attended The Urban School of San Francisco. After high school, she studied at Yale University, where she graduated with her Bachelor of Arts (cum laude) in 1992.
Rebecca Walker began her career at Ms. magazine, New York City as a contributing editor in 1989.
After graduating from Yale University, in 1992 Rebecca Walker co-founded the Third Wave Fund, a non-profit organization aimed at encouraging young women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. She also has been the owner of Kokobar in Brooklyn, New York since 1996.
Moreover, Walker teaches the art of memoir at workshops, MFA programs, and writing conferences internationally, and is a private publishing consultant to writers of both fiction and non-fiction developing their work for publication. She lectures on writing memoirs, multi-generational feminism, diversity in the media, multi-racial identity, contemporary visual arts and emerging cultures. Moreover, her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, BookForum, TheHuffington Post, Spin, Babble, Salon, Marie Claire, Glamour, Child, Plum, Essence, Vibe, Buddhadharma and several award-winning anthologies.
Besides, Rebecca is the author of the original "Third Wave primer To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism", in print for more than ten years and taught in Gender Studies programs around the world. She is also the author of the bestselling post-civil rights memoir "Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self" and "What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future".
Additionally, Rebecca Walker has spoken at hundreds of high schools and universities including Exeter, Head Royce, Harvard, Oberlin, Smith, MIT, Xavier, and Stanford, and addressed dozens of organizations and corporations including The National Council of Teachers of English, the Walker Arts Center, Tulisoma, RuterDam Stockholm, Hewitt Associates, and the Ministries of Culture and Gender of Estonia, at the first-ever Conference on Masculinity in the Baltics. She concentrates on speaking about multicultural identity (including her own), enlightened masculinity, and inter-generational and third-wave feminism at high schools, universities and conferences around the world. Walker has also been featured on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Also, in the 1998 film Primary Colors, Walker played the character March. The movie is a roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
In March 2014, the film rights for her novel "Adé: A Love Story" (2013) were reported to have been optioned, with Madonna to serve as director.
Currently, Rebecca Walker lives in Hawaii and Northern California, United States.
Rebecca Walker is best known for her role as the original leader and founder of the Third Wave Feminism, the movement, and the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a non-profit organization.
Time Magazine named Rebecca Walker one of fifty most influential American leaders under forty because of her transformative views on race, gender, sexuality and power - an award which has been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters and an Honorary Doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Among her other awards were the 1992 Yale University Pickens Prize for excellence in African American scholarship, the Feminist of the Year award from the Fund for Feminist Majority in 1992, the Paz y Justicia award from Vanguard Foundation, the California Abortion Rights Action League Champion of Choice award, and the Kingsborough Community College Woman of Distinction award.
Moreover, her bestselling post-civil rights memoir "Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self" became the winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association.
Additionally, Walker is featured in The Advocate′s "Forty Under 40" issue of June-July 2009 as one of the most influential "out" media professionals.
In 2016, she was selected as one of BBC's 100 Women.
Walker first emerged as a prominent feminist at the age of 22 when she wrote an article for Ms. magazine titled "Becoming the Third Wave". In her article, Walker criticizes the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, an attorney whom he supervised during his time at the Department of Education and the EEOC. Using this example, Walker addresses the oppression of the female voice and introduces the concept of Third-Wave Feminism. She defines "third-wave feminism" at the end of the article by saying: "To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them".
Quotations:
"...when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore."
"Sex can look like love if you don't know what love looks like."
"Because mothers make us, because they map our emotional terrain before we even know we are capable of having an emotional terrain, they know just where to stick the dynamite. With a few small power plays - a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval or praise - a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules."
"One may be nice on the outside but on the inside isn't pretty."
"It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom."
"Judgments like "right" and "wrong" only build barriers and encourage shame within individuals."
"My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships."
"Take this one in my belly. He (or she) is determined to be here. I can feel the force of his being. It's as if he has something to do here and just wants to arrive and grow up so he can get to it."
"Blood strikes back."
Membership
Walker has been the original leader and founding member of Third Wave Feminism, the movement, and the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a non-profit organization that works through grant-making, leadership development, and philanthropic advocacy to support young women ages 15 to 30 working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice.
Third Wave Foundation
1992
Personality
Walker identifies herself as bisexual.
Quotes from others about the person
Chartwell: "With a rare combination of wisdom and warmth, Rebecca fills her talks with real stories of her relationships, family and cultural expectations - and anxiety about living up to them - as well as risk-taking and decision-making. She is able to engage, educate, listen to her audience in a manner that invites learning, growth and respect."
Connections
Rebecca Walker had a relationship with neo-soul musician Meshell Ndegeocello, whose son she has helped raise even after the adults had separated.
At the age of 37, she became pregnant during her relationship with her partner Glen, a Buddhist teacher. They had a son together named Tenzin, born in 2007.
