What White Publisher's Won't Print - Zora Neale Hurston - 1950

Thanks to the blog Color Online which profiled Speak So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Lucy Anne Hurston. thus reminding me that I owned this wonderful piece of work. Yesterday, I posted about the more things change in publishing the more they stay the same and even though many times I blog from a place of pure frustration when it comes to the subject of Seg-Book-gation - it is also a place of stark truth. Fifty-nine years ago Zora Neale Hurston wrote and essay about it. I've posted it here today - it's long, but so worth the read:

What White Publishers Won't Print by Zora Neale Hurston

I HAVE been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and
emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
This lack of interest is much more important than it seems at first glance. It is even more
important at this time than it was in the past. The internal affairs of the nation have bearings on the
international stress and strain, and this gap in the national literature now has tremendous weight in
world affairs. National coherence and solidarity is implicit in a thorough understanding of the various groups within a nation, and this lack of knowledge about the internal emotions and behavior of the minorities cannot fail to bar out understanding. Man, like all the other animals fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign.

The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the
servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation. This blank is NOT filled by the fiction built around upper- class Negroes exploiting the race problem. Rather, it tends to point it up. A college-bred Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem, more or less. It calls to mind a story of slavery time. In this story, a master with more intellectual curiosity than usual, set out to see how much he could teach a particularly bright slave of his. When he had gotten him up to higher mathematics and to be a fluent reader of Latin, he called in a neighbor to show off his brilliant slave, and to argue that Negroes had brains just like the slave-owners had, and given the same opportunities, would turn out the same.

The Visiting master of slaves looked and listened, tried to trap the literate slave in Algebra and
Latin, and "failing to do so in both, fumed to his neighbor and said:
"Yes, he certainly knows his higher mathematics, and he can read Latin better than many white
men I know, but I cannot bring myself to believe that he understands a thing that he is doing. It is all an aping of our culture. All on the outside. You are crazy if you think that it has changed him 1nslde in the least. Turn him loose, and he will revert at once to the jungle. He is still a savage, and no amount of translating Virgil and Ovid have done is to turngoing to change him. In fact, all you have done is to turn a useful savage into a dangerous beast."

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Bernice L. McFadden