No Zora Neale Hurston slander will be tolerated!

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]It's so interesting how every 4 months there's a whole conversation and people want to talk about why they don't like Zora Neale Hurston. Y'all do the same thing with Toni Morrison, but we're on Miss Zora today.

[00:00:11]Um, why y'all don't like Zora Neale Hurston, why she problematic, if she was out today we wouldn't like her, why black women go up for her, she wasn't a black feminist, why do black feminists like her, blah, blah, blah, all of that.

[00:00:23]You're not radical for not liking Zora Neale Hurston.

[00:00:26]Nobody liked that lady.

[00:00:28]That's the point.

[00:00:30]She was so disrespected.

[00:00:32]She done died in a unmarked grave somewhere and Alice Walker had to find her.

[00:00:38]She was dragged through the mud in the papers.

[00:00:42]Beefing with Langston Hughes. People said that she cared too much about what the Southern Negroes, how they talked, and she still prioritized the voices of Southern black people, black people in the sticks that the well-to-do blacks did not care about and thought that they were poor representations of what blackness meant. And she said, "Okay."

[00:01:02]So, sure, maybe that y'all have critiques of her. Sure, everybody can be critiqued. For you not liking her is not special because nobody did. And those of us who are choosing to like her and to see her for her full humanity as not just an anthropologer anthropologist, not just a writer, not just a playwright, but as a woman.

[00:01:25]Sorry, y'all can't relate to accepting black women for their flaws and for their distastefulness, and for their wit, and for their humor, and for their lies, and for their deceit, but also for the radical work that they put in the world for us, like move around, thing, y'all.