Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Walker

A color analogy sounds soft until you notice how much it refuses to apologize. By pairing “womanist” with “feminist” the way “purple” relates to “lavender,” Alice Walker makes a claim about scale, saturation, and who gets centered. Lavender suggests a paler, more socially “acceptable” version of the hue; purple is fuller, darker, harder to ignore. The subtext is blunt: mainstream feminism, as it was popularly articulated in the late 20th century, often read as a diluted politics of gender that could flatten race, class, culture, and community into background detail.

Walker’s phrasing is doing strategic work. It doesn’t reject feminism; it repositions it as a subset, a tint. “Womanist” isn’t a rival brand so much as a deeper pigment: gender justice that insists Black women’s lives are not an add-on, and that liberation has to account for family, love, spirituality, labor, and the everyday negotiations of survival. The analogy also dodges jargon. Anyone can feel the difference between purple and lavender, which makes the argument legible beyond activist or academic spaces.

Context matters: Walker coins “womanist” in the wake of civil rights and second-wave feminism’s gains and blind spots, at a moment when Black women writers and theorists were naming the cost of being told to choose between racial solidarity and feminist critique. The elegance here is the refusal to choose; purple contains lavender, but it’s not obligated to be mistaken for it.