Racist White critics and assimilationist Black critics alike rejected Their Eyes Were Watching God

Evidence

Hurston did not sell many copies, despite the largely positive (and racist) reviews from White critics. The novel reflects “normal” southern Negro life “with its holdovers from slave times, its social difficulties, childish excitements, and endless exuberances,” according to one New York Times reviewer. Their Eyes Were Watching God is filled “with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness,” hailed the New York Herald Tribune’s reviewer. While racist Whites enjoyed Hurston’s depictions of every Negro “who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory,” to quote a reviewer from the New York Herald Tribune, Alain Locke, the godfather of media suasion, demanded that Hurston stop creating “these pseudo-primitives who the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy.” Richard Wright, drowning in all of his cultural racism, unable and unwilling to see her missives of antiracist feminism, and unable to see the politics of her love story, said the novel “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” It only exploited the “quaint” aspects of Black life. It was like a minstrel show in a book, Wright maintained, satisfying the tastes of White readers. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 892

Categorization

• XREF: A sharp case study: racist and assimilationist positions converge in condemning the same antiracist work — useful when testing Kendi’s scheme against real critical reception.
• SEED: Article angle: when enemies and allies misread the same text for opposite reasons — Hurston rejected from both sides while writing antiracist feminism.