David Winer posted an Alice Walker quote originally posted at the Book Notes web log. Walker is quoted as saying, “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
The problem with this quote is that Walker is a complete hypocrite. In 1989, Walker wrote a piece called, What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?. After a long diatribe, Walker concludes that the only thing white men should say is, “I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and meditate on this.”
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
One of my writer friends, one of Walker’s hated white males, is diabetic and requires regular injections of insulin to survive. Alice Walker, on the other hand, is an avowed animal rights activist who has compared the sorts of experiments that resulted in insulin therapy to slavery in 18th and 17th century United States. Ban such experiments she says.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or demands you right to grow. Add ” …or survive” to the end of that, and you have a perfect description of everything that Walker stand opposed to, despite the phony sentiment she tries to convey in this quote.