Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

Earl's abject(ed) body works as a site in which the white family falls into crisis. His other-ed body gets inscribed as that which transgresses, and therefore threatens, the bourgeois white family. Although Earl is silent, we do know that he "attack[s] ferociously when put to the breast" (68) and that his first (perhaps only) word is "either 'eat' or 'meat'" (76). Unlike Arvay, the reader might recognize that Earl is not trying to reference a bodily function or a source of protein, but rather he is trying to say his own name. Instead, what comes out is an ambiguous, half-formed desire: not "Earl" or "me," but "eat," "meat." Earl's deformed white body can incorporate food but cannot speak; he cannot use language properly to define himself in relation to others, cannot carve out a normative white subjectivity.

If Earl hyperbolizes Arvay's inability to express orally her feelings of class inadequacy or sexual shame, then her explosion in the following scene more than makes up for her previous silences. In this scene, Arvay rages against Jim's privileging of their more eugenically sound children, Angeline and Kenny, reading the problematic white family as symptomatic of larger class and racial structures:

"You[, Jim,] come from some big high muck-de-mucks, and we[, Arvay and Earl,] ain't nothing but piney-woods Crackers and poor white trash. Even niggers is better than we is, according to your kind.... Earl is always wrong because he's like my folks. 'Taint never nothing wrong with Angeline and Kenny because they take after your side." (126)

Arvay's emphasis on the hierarchical constructions of race and class demonstrates how the rural, poor, "cacogenic" white family does not fit neatly into the black-white binary." 'Even niggers is better than we is'" signifies the racially degraded relationship between what has been constructed in the novel as other: "white trash" and "niggers." Hurston re-presents a racial hierarchy here which can be read as that which places "big high" whiteness at the top, assumes "niggers" is always already lowly or "trash," and that "white trash" either verges on or entirely falls beneath the construction of this "blackness." So if Earl is "always wrong because he's like [Arvay's] folks," then his "wrong" whiteness ("nothing but piney-woods Crackers and poor white trash") taints the assumed purity of "right" whiteness. Arvay articulates these differences within whiteness itself with a passion the reader has not seen since Jim "scorched" her home from church at the novel's beginning. Her articulation of how economic differe nces get written on the body paves the way for a more personalized sense of her body as something which falls outside the (white) norm.

3. Falling Outside of the White Body

As I posited earlier, the way in which metaphors of private abjection ooze over into the public realm oftentimes depends on racial and class-based fantasies which equate personal cleanliness with social perfection. Cracker and white trash can be thought of as terms which implicate the impure body in systems of racial and class division. The conjuring of an impure body, a white body which must rid itself of trash, speaks to a specifc metaphor of bodily fluids and waste. Elizabeth Grosz draws from Julia Kristeva to think about the relation of the excremental object to the excrementalized subject: