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.
