Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Walker

Walker’s sentence refuses the comforting fiction that prejudice lives somewhere else, in someone else. The verb choice is the tell: “own” turns fear from an abstract social weather system into personal property. Not “acknowledge” or “confess,” but claim. It’s a moral demand with teeth, because ownership implies responsibility and the possibility of repair. She frames fear as reciprocal (“of each other”), a move that doesn’t flatten power differences so much as expose how fear circulates and reproduces itself across lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

The pivot to “practical” and “daily” is Walker at her most strategically unsentimental. She’s not selling catharsis; she’s prescribing habit. That matters in a culture that loves symbolic breakthroughs more than boring repetition. By insisting on “some daily way,” she implies that racism and other inherited biases are less like opinions than like muscle memory: learned early, reinforced constantly, and undone only through deliberate practice.

The sharpest subtext sits in the closing clause: “differently than the way we were brought up to.” She points at socialization as the engine of fear, the home as the first institution, tradition as an unexamined curriculum. It’s also a quiet rebuke to nostalgia. If your upbringing taught you who to distrust, then loyalty to “how we were raised” can become loyalty to a lie.

Contextually, Walker’s work has long fused the personal with the political; this line continues that tradition by making inner reckoning a civic act, and making change less a grand conversion than a series of chosen re-sees.