Blackness In Alice Walker's Everyday Use

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In today’s society many blacks misconstrue what it truly means to love blackness. I believe that it is imperative to make the distinction between appreciating black history and appreciating blackness. Of course, the two should by no means be mutually exclusive, but to my own understanding, sometimes it can be easy to appreciate the attainments of blacks, while still instilling personal checks on our own behavior in public because we are afraid of being equated with an inferior culture and class. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use”, Walker displays the reality of what it looks like for an African American to confuse fetishizing blackness for loving blackness. Dee, a main character who battles with this conception is clearly in need …show more content…

In Walker’s “Everyday Use”, the main character Mama who embraces what it means to love blackness clearly has an accurate idea about what “heritage” is, unlike her daughter Dee. For Mama, the family objects in her house are infused with the presence of the people who made and used them. The family heirlooms are the true tokens of Dee’s identity and origins, but Dee knows little about the past. Dee says, “I can use the church top as a centerpiece for the alcove table… and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”1 She later continues and expresses, “Can I have these old quilts?...Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!...She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.” Dee views her authentic heritage as dead or something of the past, rather than as a living, or an ongoing creation. She desires the sculpted dasher and family quilts, however she considers them to be ancient rarities of a lost time, reasonable for show yet not for real or pragmatic use. She has set herself outside her own history, dismissing her genuine legacy for a built one. Dee should know that loving blackness is not the fascination of dated materials, it is the understanding and appreciation of all that was produced through these things, utilizing the same products regardless of what things new have been created to do the job better. These family heirlooms are not

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