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

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

The trashing of Hurston and Seraph by the media in 1948, as well the more recent critiques of and/or indifference to the novel, provides an interesting history of the novel, one in which this article seeks to intervene. Working from a class-conscious and psychoanalytic interpretive frame, this article moves the novel into a different light by deconstructing the politics of "trash" which are found both within and outside of Seraph. The irony involved in the text's status as that which has been "trashed" by critics, from its publication up until very recent analyses, establishes an historical context which extends over the text's writing of the moody, "white trash" heroine Arvay (Henson) Meserve. The white trash which Arvay embodies functions as a racial and class trope which combines the clean-dirty binary with racial and class-based identity. In order to understand the full meaning of Arvay, her white trash identity, and its implication for African American cultural politics, I will connect Hurston's novel w ith narratives of anthropological eugenics and incorporate readings of the abject white body to show how waste and whiteness figure into Hurston's fiction. In the broader context of eugenic anthropology, I submit, Seraph's tracing of destitution, motherhood, class mobilization, and excretion shows how, for Hurston, racial categories always intersect with other categories, and the fluidity of the body always messes up any clean and proper understanding of the self.

Whiteness and Eugenics

In her study of race and motherhood, Laura Doyle reminds us that "the era of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism was also the era of eugenics" (10). [6] Particularly from 1900 to 1940, eugenics had a broad impact on U.S. political culture, igniting debates about race and racism, national purity and national progress. A cultural paranoia over defective germ-plasm helped to shape a national conversation about how good and bad marriages and selective breeding might effect the strength of a (white) American future. Early-twentieth-century uneasiness about lower-class whites overpopulating the nation led to a panicked organization of public and private research which could eugenically chart lines of white families. Eugenic reports on white rural poor-including maps, tables, diagrams, and their analyses--advanced an ideology of wasteful or weak human stock; the cultural moment of American eugenics both influenced and was influenced by a common-sense racial logic which associated "whiteness" with the clean and t he good, the pure and the pleasing.

Since at least the mid-1990s, a market has opened for critical studies on racial whiteness in the humanities. The most familiar arguments (those by Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Richard Dyer) foreground the common-sense connection of racial whiteness with an aesthetic gorgeousness, critiquing the way in which whiteness is easily collapsed into the clean, the pure, and the racially unmarked. [7] Toni Morrison, among others, calls for the "examin[ation of] the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered" the effect of racist inflection on the subject (11). Many critics ask, along with Morrison, "What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as 'American'?" (9). A good question. Perhaps by establishing an affinity between eugenic narratives of bad blood and Hurston's novel about "white trash" we can tease out what it means for white Americ a to want to purge its supposedly "impure" elements.