Tag Archives: Hurston

Hurston and Engineering the Invisibility of Race

Posted on by
Reply

In Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston explores the ironic distance created between herself and the world by racism. Her claim that “the game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting” summarizes one of her main points, that there is an inherent tragedy in operating from a point of racial superiority (Hurston). Her anecdote about her white friend’s inability to understand jazz in the same way as her ends with her claim that “the great blogs of purple and red emotion have not touched him,” alluding to an emotional colorlessness attached to his whiteness (Hurston). His displacement within the black jazz club is not just unfelt because of his race, but because of an inbred blindness that has never been challenged in him. He is not refusing the music or it’s meaning; he can only hear “good music” because he has been trained to hear it as that and that alone (Hurston). Hurston sees this as almost tragic, the inability to access a layer of emotion that she clearly appreciates a great deal.

The absence of race, or a simulation of such a thing, also factors into Hurston’s view of the inescapable reality of race. Her statement that in certain moments “I have no race, I am me” calls back to her childhood realization of her own race, the moment she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl” (Hurston). The presence of race as a complication is a given, but she is able to displace its effects from her mind because of her perspective. She remembers what it is like to be in a non-racialized mindset, or at least one not racialized by her herself. This allows her to break apart her status as a Black woman in society, pulling out the positives while mitigating the negatives as much as possible. Her analysis gives her the tools to fight back on some level against the conditions in which she must live.

The Mystery of the Invisible Whiteness

Posted on by
1
                                           
      I found that the most interesting part of Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s essay “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” is the idea that “to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race… acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made ‘me.’” Similarly, it is very easy to imagine that the current moment in history is disconnected from the moments of the past, but we must ask ourselves if that’s a perspective that comes out of the myopic view that whiteness creates. These limits on creativity, be they literal creativity or the mental kind that allows one to better conceptualize the world around them, are intrinsically tied to race in the American consciousness.
      The work of Hurston itself is a great example of how race in writing is treated by white society. In describing her experiences growing up in the South, Hurston is far beyond making explicit the divide and differences between racial groups. Her very existence is split; for her Black neighbors her dancing is something to leave unacknowledged, while the White visitors to the town treat her as an amusement. In a way, this is a clear parallel to the way in which the reader with unexamined views on race may read Hurston. Rankine mentions that “writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn’t and shouldn’t enter” and this is something that writers even project onto each other. For Hurston to write about her youth, an inherently Black experience, would not raise any eyebrows among the (white) literary elite because it is assumed that a Black author would write on Black topics; the dialect that she uses phonetically in her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was only really objected by Black writers. White writers, by contrast, assume that a Black author is not only qualified to write about Black topics, but indeed almost required to do so. Although the tide of history has reversed these opinions somewhat, Hurston’s work is still representative of the unconsciousness with which whiteness accepts the limitations that it itself places on blackness.