African American Identity In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

“Everyday use” by Alice Walker, was set in the early 1970s when many African American were struggling to define their social and cultural identity. It was a time when many blacks were looking back to their African roots in an effort to reconnect with their ancestors and struggling to reject their American heritage which was dominated by injustice and painful histories. Alice Walker try to clarify this double consciousness problem in “ Everyday Use” by pointing out that one can be black and still embrace his African heritages without losing his American identity. The narrator humbly tell us that she is a typical rural black American women who live on subsistence farming but she rejected the traditional gender role by having a masculine

The superficial Wangero, however, wants nothing from the quilt but to “ hang [it]”(72), just for aesthetic value. Maggie is not into the artifacts which Dee is dying for. She is into the people who created the artifacts, her ancestors, those people whose clothes had been cut off to make the quilt. Here let’s not forget that when mama offered the quilt to Dee (Wangero) when she went away to college she declined the offer by saying “they are old fashioned, out of

The Black Panthers and Black Muslims were among the groups emerged. By the 1960s many young African Americans begun to reject the legacy of slavery and anything associated with it including Christianity. As part of the rejection many adopted islam as their religion. Hakim-a-barber , “ the short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel”(317), is one of the black muslim mentioned in Walker’s story. The way he dressed up and appeared, Hakim-a-barber represents younger generation of African Americans who wanted to get in touch with their African roots by just changing their name or having African hair style and adopting Islam as their