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

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

To paraphrase, the "social waste" of the (white) race must be cleaned up, washed out, or flushed from the system in order to preserve a healthy, orderly nation of white taxpayers. It is interesting to me, as perhaps it was to Hurston, that white-on-white racial discourse (eugenic theory) makes use of a cleansing metaphor, as if the whiteness of whites cannot be white enough, but must be purged and sterilized until any "one" who makes a mess of it has been eliminated.

Public and Private Abjection

To posit the body as a metaphor for socio-political or psychological systems is nothing new. However, the articulation of white class differences in the language of waste and pollution indicates that a modernist anxiety about the white body--in an increasingly self-conscious multi-ethnic, multi-racial America--produces the specter of white trash precisely because bourgeois whites might not be able to figure intra-racial differences as anything other than a clinging, yet not quite palpable, abjection. Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection theorizes the way in which the not-so-simple binaries of clean/dirty, pure/impure, and self/other circle around the clinging, sticky phenomenon of "abjection." As we shall see, the self's psychic relation to the other depends upon the dizzying effects of abjection, which both affects and infects the political and psychological meanings of race, class, and corporeal differences. [14]

Kristeva articulates the difficulty of securing a meaningful identity in a mess of interior organs, bodily tissues, and open orifices: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable....what is abject...is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (1-2). How and where does this sense of exclusion, this collapse of meaning manifest itself?

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protects me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck....These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (2-3)

Any object which threatens the stability of what Kristeva calls "my own and clean self" points toward psychic abjection. That which jeopardizes the security of the dualistic nature of the "I" (speaking subject) and the body (spoken subject) signifies a horror of notknowing, a blurring of the body's borders: Where do(es) "I" stop and "the world" begin? For Kristeva, disgust and repulsion wrack the body only so that a more coherent ego can exist, so that the body can say "I" fully knowing that which it is not (not corpse, not waste, not shit, not a horrifying mess of incoherency). The very private signifiers of abjection (bodily fluids, filth) bleed over into the public realm for Kristeva, who imagines that "it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4).