google reminds us that it's zora neale hurston's birthday (i wrote about her extensively in act like you know). this is indeed something to be celebrated, and in my opinion she is the greatest of american novelists, more or less. now, i would like to see, say, melissa harris-perry, or all those feminist/anti-racist guardian columnists really grapple with how absolutely free she was to express whatever she damn pleased abiout race, how pointedly and continuously boldly anti-pc she was. this is part of how she ended up dying in loneliness, poverty, and obscurity. see, langston hughes and richard wright and paul robeson were, more or less, stalinists, the doinks, and they and others tried to enforce this as well as, say, w.e.b. dubois racial orthodoxy, on every black artist. you better enforce it, because you sure ain't got no argument for it. zora, on the other hand, is actually fucking free: she let herself be free, and she paid the price. but that, as well as the super-excellence of the writing and the folklore etc, is why i love her.
how it feels to be colorless me
