The Root web page,  frontpages an article by Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, under the headline, ‘I am not voting for Obama because he is black…..’  The headline and sub-head at the top of the article is:

Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave. 

By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com

The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.

which I am beginning And unsurprisingly, since it comes from a doughty fighter from that band of feminists who believe that the personal is political, the first few hundred words are about Alice Walker, not Barack Obama.

Here are some of the first few paragraphs. Before you read them, remember that Alice Walker was born 79 years after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative,  Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as “Miss” when they reached the age of twelve.)  …….

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.  They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night.  She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn:  not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain.  Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming.  During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve.  Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn’t pay it to a nigger.  That before she’d pay a nigger that much money she’d milk the dairy cows herself.

Walker broke out of slavery with the help of an education at Sarah Lawrence, an elite women’s college, where she able to converse on equal terms with white women, who these days are eager to pay money to buy her books.

Having told the reader where she is coming from, she then moves on to Obama:

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better.   It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him.  Cannot see what he carries in his being.  Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black,  white, yellow, red and brown – choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me. When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required.  Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change

America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change

America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

What I have quoted is only a small part of what Walker has to say. Click this link to read the whole thing on The Root web page, whom I must thank for the picture.