Google honors a conservative today: Zora Neale Hurston.Well, Hurston was against Brown v. Board of Education, so I guess they have something in common at that.
It's nice to see them celebrating a black person who isn't insane. But it's sad that politics is all that can animate them to do so. In one of the supporting documents for Miller's case, John McWhorter writes:
Hurston’s modern fan base doesn’t know quite what to do with all this. “I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be,” [Alice] Walker writes... Sure -- but if Hurston had been more inclined to sing about what happens to a raisin in the sun, one suspects that Walker would have had no trouble celebrating her as an “artist/politician.”Really? I guess McWhorter so judges because he figures everyone else must be like him, counting artists like captured checkers for their cause. But we haven't all been made into Zhdanovites yet.
UPDATE. Commenter D. Johnston dipped into the support docs and found "in a nutshell, McWhorter's case is based around the fact that Hurston didn't believe that black people should take credit for things other, unrelated black people did. See? She rejected identity politics!" Supporting a policy is a political decision, emotions and behavior are not. I don't think being self-sufficient is any guarantee of how you'll vote. I've spent my whole life working in the private sector, yet I'm far more liberal than anyone on wingnut welfare.
