Free The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Page A

me. One was to raise money for Winnie Mandela and South Africa. The other was to raise money for animal rights because I was just beginning to deal with my own feeling of responsibility towards animals. There were people who were very critical of that because they immediately thought that I was equating human beings with animals in a negative way. I mean I definitely do equate them, but positively. It seemed to me so right because the oppression that black people suffer in South Africa—and people of color, women, and children face all over the world—is the same oppression that animals endure every day to a greater degree.
     
    E.B.: In terms of public activism, the animal rights movement is predominantly white and middle-class. Why is that?
     
    A.W.: I think white, middle-class people are the only people who have the time to do the things that have to be done.
    At the same time, I feel that, inasmuch as I am a citizen of the planet, my responsibility to other beings is clear. I don’t see the responsibility
for promulgating an animal rights agenda falling just on white middle-class people. I think that everyone has to nurture an awareness of the ways that we are connected to animals—the essence of what being animal is—and to cherish and literally try to save animals.
    I think many people of color feel that they’re facing extinction. It’s a little difficult, then, to put the energy that you have to fight for your own life into trying to fight for the lives of creatures that you are also exploiting. It’s a very heavy bind.
     
    E.B.: Although every day provides us with an opportunity to feel better about ourselves by personally resisting and boycotting violence towards nonhuman animals, many people are hostile and defensive about changing their lifestyles. Why do you think that is?
     
    A.W.: I think that people are defensive about change because people are basically lazy. If they already feel that they are suffering under a horrible government, the world is going crazy, and war is everywhere, then it’s a little hard to now have to think about everything they eat and wear.
    It would be nice to think that universal enlightenment occurs at once, but it doesn’t. I think you can only hope to inspire people—to move them by what you see yourself, by what you feel yourself, and by what you do. It may take them weeks, months, years, but once you reach them, they start to work on the problem, whatever it is. If I didn’t have faith that that is what happens, I wouldn’t bother to work at all.
    When I write a novel about child abuse and sexist violence, I expect that a lot of the wife beaters and a lot of the child abusers are going to be really hostile and resentful. Of course, they don’t want to stop this behavior. This is the behavior they learned from their mama and daddy. Since it didn’t kill them, it’s obviously the right thing to do.
    But if the argument and the scenario is presented in such a way that it truly engages the feelings of the abusers, then I think we have a change coming in those people. I don’t care how much they claim they’re not going to change or how much they claim this doesn’t happen. Once they are moved, the change is inevitable because you cannot live so divided within yourself, between what you know to be right and what you are in fact doing that isn’t right.

     
    E.B.: Why do you think people are so invested in being violent towards nonhuman animals?
     
    A.W.: In thinking about The Color Purple , I should have included the mistreatment of dogs in poor communities, especially in southern black communities like the one in the book. Even today, in some of these communities, there is a real battering of dogs, in addition to a lot of child abuse and wife battering.
    I think that people really pass on what’s done to them. Therefore, we can only really change people by treating them differently. In that sense, you can understand how violence is not only obsolete, it’s