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Alas, we enter February and another “Black History Month.” Yep, I’m white, and no, I’m not a racist; rather, I object to propaganda and pandering. And I merely echo black writers when I lament this offensive and downright silly observance. As if we can — or should — segregate the history of one race from everyone else’s.
I know how miffed those writers feel: I’m just as irritated at the upcoming “Women’s History Month” (as if we can — or should — segregate the history of one sex from the other’s). Congress in another fit of pandering first foisted that on us in 1981, when it denominated March as such. You might think that with Comrade Carter dictating from the White House, legislators would have had more than enough to occupy them then. Yet they still found time for anti-constitutional shenanigans.
Nonetheless, no matter what Our Rulers and assorted demagogues pretend, we are much more than our biology; I as a white woman and you as a black man are unique and of inestimable value, created in the image of the Almighty and endowed by Him with certain inalienable rights. Let us stand on our own, then, refuting all efforts to reduce us to mere members of a group.
Unfortunately, public indoctrination centers — sorry, schools across the country lack such common sense and decency. And so they will capitalize on February to glorify black politicians. Also up for deification will be such statists as Martin Luther King, Jr., who never saw a contract or association between mutually consenting parties that he couldn’t turn antagonistic with a little help from the Feds.
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But there’s one genuine luminary whom the State’s cheerleaders always snub. Despite their encomiums for leeches such as Barbara Jordan or Condoleezza Rice, they ignore the wisdom and talent of Zora Neale Hurston.
If you haven’t read her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, you have a treat in store. Ditto for her short essay of 1928, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” which eschews the bitterness and hatred so popular among those obsessed with skin-color in favor of a sophisticated, witty acceptance of God-given variations: “… I am not tragically colored. … I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal … I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. … Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” This sturdy, eloquent, charming woman neither needs nor wants help from Marxists and politicians in earning readers’ admiration and applause.
I can’t recommend Ms. Hurston’s other efforts only because I haven’t yet read them: three more novels, short stories, plays, essays, and several anthropological works. Our heroine was multi-talented and -faceted: though she made her reputation as an author, Ms. Hurston also earned a BA in anthropology from Barnard College and completed two years of graduate work in the subject at Columbia University.
Ms. Hurston benefited from something affirmative-action laws now criminalize: born in 1891, she grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. As her biographer at her “official” website puts it, “Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town’s two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women … [telling] stories.”
No doubt that sense of belonging and security nurtured her intellect. At any rate, questions of race — a Darwinian construct that paved the way for the eugenics of the 1920s and the Nazis’ later genocide — didn’t assail her until she turned 13. Her mother died, her father remarried, and the newlyweds exiled Zora to boarding school in Jacksonville. “I was now a little colored girl,” she recalled. “… In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown … warranted not to rub nor run.”
But she didn’t let government’s fixation with such superficialities defeat her. She went on to learn and study, even listing her age as 16 rather than the actual 26 so she could finish public high school in Baltimore. Despite her abilities and her graduation from one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, she struggled as laboriously to scratch out a living as she did at marriage (twice, both brief and ending in divorce).
Her difficulties with the former largely resulted from her unflinching individualism. Ms. Hurston was among the intellectuals and artists comprising the “Harlem Renaissance”; most of them enthusiastically embraced communism as well as the conformity and racism it demands. Yet Ms. Hurston courageously insisted that “races” never accomplish anything, only persons do: “The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negroes did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That was Carver and Just.”
Critics answered such unassailable logic with carping. They accused her of currying favor with whites when the anthropologist in Ms. Hurston phonetically reproduced black dialect for her novels. One devout member of the Renaissance even complained that her stories contained no propaganda — though of course he didn’t phrase his petulance that plainly.
She just as adamantly opposed The New Deal, correctly sizing it up as slavery with golden chains: “Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes. … under relief, dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the ‘Little White Father,’ more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on and on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few. The change from a republic to a dictatorship was imperceptibly pushed ahead.”
She despised America’s unconstitutional meddling overseas, even dubbing Harry Truman the “Butcher of Asia” for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And she bravely defended black kids from the horrors of Brown v. Board of Education with a letter to the Orlando Sentinel. Indeed, she was so libertarian that thrilled fans categorize her with contemporaries Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.
I daresay Ms. Hurston would joyfully join us in rejecting “Black History Month,” given her loathing of preferences based on race: ” … if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.”
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