Everyday Use By Alice Walker Identity Essay

The Black identity is an elusive ideal. Indeed, the troubles Black people have encountered in the search for the Black identity are dwarfed only by those experienced in their troubled and difficult past. To complicate and confound things further, new concepts and notions of Blackness seem to arise with each generation. Whether rooted in activism, rejection of white ideals, or in the more immediate past, these ideals are, more often than not, troubled and complicated in and of themselves. The core conflict of luminary Black author Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” though superficially a simple family dispute over some household items, is in fact a depiction of this central conflict among the Black community. In “Everyday Use,” Walker not only depicts a stark generational divide in Black identity, but also critiques that of newer generations, cautioning that they might lose the knowledge and favor of the previous generations should they neglect the everyday use of that knowledge. The story’s 1973 publishing date reveals as much about the story and Walker’s possible intentions as do the words which comprise it. Following the significant …show more content…
Through putting a young, educated woman fixated upon recreating and reconstructing an identity long lost at odds with her more traditional family, Walker presents readers with a number of pressing questions. Chief among them, though, is the question of whether readers’, and particularly Black readers’, searches for identity come at the cost of their more immediate heritage, and whether they risk losing the favor and knowledge of the generations before them in trying to create something new for themselves with the opportunities those generations fought for. There is a danger, Walker asserts in this story, in forgetting and neglecting where you come from. It is a caution to be well