"The Color Purple unleashed a storm of controversy upon its publication. Critics charged Walker with focusing on the sexual oppression of black women at the expense of dealing with the overall oppression of blacks. However, Walker's novel is a complex analysis of race relations and racial identity. Celie's letters to God are the sole narrative for the first half of the novel. Celie is a poor, uneducated, Southern black woman. Her experiences are limited to a small geographic area. However, when she discovers her sister Nettie's letters after years of separation, Walker situates Celie's narrative at the crossroads of a complex discourse on racial identity.
Samuel, Nettie, and Corrine travel to Africa as missionaries. They naively expect Africans to identify with them on the basis of their race. However, Africans often associate them with other foreigners. They are not welcomed as long-lost brothers and sisters. The Olinka village where they work regards them with a mixture of contempt and indifference. They see missionaries as invaders who want to change their culture. Samuel and Nettie in particular want Africans to acknowledge their role in the slave trade that condemned their ancestors to a life of toil and misery in America. However, Samuel, Nettie, and Corrine do not acknowledge their complicity with European colonization of Africa.
Celie's narrative provides a compelling contrast to the situation of African women. She suffers rape at the hands of her step-father and physical abuse at the hands of her husband. She is a Christian woman, but Christianity does not alleviate her problems. Moreover, the church she attends subscribes to restrictive notions of femininity. The women at her church stared judgmentally at her when she was pregnant with her two children. They condemn Shug Avery for having a sexually active lifestyle. They disapprove of her singing, her risque clothing, and her smoking. Celie does not even know about the existence of her clitoris until Shug tells her about it. When she and Shug become lovers, Celie experiences the pleasures of sex for the first time in her life. She celebrates the discovery of her sexuality.
Olinka women live in a polygamous society. Their husbands have total control over whether they live or die. Infidelity is justification enough in Olinka culture for a man to kill his wife. They do not believe girls deserve an education. They believe women are most useful as the mothers of their husbands' children. Mr. _____ marries Celie because he wants someone to look after his children and clean his house.
Tashi's relationship to her cultural identity is rife with conflict. On one hand, she is rebellious even as a young child. After meeting Olivia, she does not plan to live according to the traditional Olinka lifestyle. She does not undergo the traditional female circumcision at puberty like other Olinka girls, and she pursues an education secretly through Olivia.
When English colonists rob her people of their land in order to start rubber plantations, Tashi is torn between her individual desires and the threat of annihilation facing Olinka culture. She chooses to undergo the traditional Olinka facial scarring ceremony as well as the traditional female circumcision. In order to aid the Olinka in the preservation of their cultural identity, Tashi accepts both the indelible Olinka facial scars and the castration of Olinka women. She gives up her clitoris in the name of consolidating Olinka identity. Her sacrifice is a remarkable contrast to Celie's liberating sexual awakening.
Walker's novel portrays racial identity as a complex, varied discourse. However, black woman in America and Africa suffer the same problems of male violence and control. In a sense, the novel suggests that it is impossible to explore black racial identity without dealing with the status of black women. Her novel is unapologetic in its attacks on sexism, and it is equally unapologetic in its attacks on racism, even the racism of American blacks toward Africans. If the collective problems of blacks are to be addressed, then so must the collective plight of black women. Walker wants a black identity that assures black women equal status with black men. Without addressing this issue, any project of fighting for racial equality is marred by hypocrisy from the start.
"(http://www.sparknotes.com/guides/purple/)
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