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

Although eugenics, as a discourse, shifts from "negative" to "positive" poles, family studies and bulletin reports from the Eugenics Records Office in the early twentieth century conceptualize social eugenics as a progressive, racial uplift project. [8] In the ERO's 1914 Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting off the Defective GermPlasm in the American Population, Harry H. Laughlin summarizes, "The committee will point out what appears as the result of study to be 'the best practical means,' so far as innate traits are a factor, of purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of [defective] anti-social classes" (6). That is, the "purging of blood" from (pure) white America meant eliminating "deteriorating" influences, influences which could be spotted-by eugenical "experts"-directly on the "deteriorating" white body. In most cases, this included deformity, feeble-mindedness, albinism, alcoholism, miscegenation, and cr iminality. The interpretation of white grotesquery as a signifier of an inherited interior pollution would produce what Nicole Hahn Rafter calls a "White Trash myth" ("Introduction" 30) [9] According to Rafter, this myth was also linked to rural geographic areas where an overabundance of white trash communities thrived: mountains, pine-lands, swamps, woods, hills, ravines (7).

Social-scientific measurings of these populations--from the obsessive detailing of bodies, vitalities, and diseases to the charting of occupations, feelings, intelligences, and sexualities--sought to block their reproduction in order to ensure a "pure" white race for the future of "America." [10]

Perhaps Hurston's interest in writing about the white rural poor of Florida stemmed not only from a desire to "break the rules" concerning blacks writing only about blacks, and not merely to "pander to white readers," but to put into fiction a working knowledge of the way in which certain whites were being characterized in anthropological studies. [11] While there is no material link between Hurston's fictional and anthropological work and eugenic family studies, thematic similarities between the two suggest a broad cultural overlap that one might not immediately suspect. We do know, for example, that, working under Franz Boas, Hurston spent time gathering measurements of black Harlemites' bodies in the late 1920s. [12] But it is the research and writing which Hurston did in Florida, under the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, which most strongly links Hurston with the white trash narratives of the eugenicists. As John Lowe explains, "Although Hurston certainly knew some Crackers when she was growing up, her most intense scrutiny of this group came much later, after she had become both a practicing folklorist and novelist accustomed to noting the intricacies of sociological and anthropological detail as a member of the Federal Writers' Project in 1938-39" (265). In her collection of Hurston's FWP writings, Pam Bordelon also argues that "the massive FWP research engine supplied background material for Hurston's last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, a seminal connection that has never been established. Indeed, the connection between Hurston's FWP experience and Seraph is so complete that one can find passages where Hurston lifted sentences from her FWP field notes and placed them in the mouths of her novel's characters" (x). [13] Hurston's direct involvement with the documentation and study of Florida Crackers from an anthropological perspective stands in mimetic relation to descriptive accounts of the "cacogenic" authorized in ERO reports. As we shall see, Hurston's Seraph both participates in and resists--perhap s even at times parodies--a eugenic ideology of tainted blood.