February is Black History Month.\u00a0 As those on the right (and even an increasing number of people elsewhere) know well enough, these four weeks are all too easily used by activists as an opportunity to promote a politics of victimhood congenial to a leftist agenda.<\/p>\n
The famed black writer\u2014and conservative\u2014<\/i>Zora Neale Hurston, frustrates this program.<\/p>\n
Born in the early 1890\u2019s in the lower South, Hurston would one day join the ranks of those black writers who became associated with \u201cthe Harlem Renaissance.\u201d\u00a0 Unlike most of her colleagues, however, she staunchly rejected the communism and socialism with which they sympathized.<\/p>\n
Hurston resented the efforts made by black and white intellectual alike to make of black Americans a new proletariat, a victim class perpetually in need of an all-encompassing national government to ease the \u201clowdown dirty deal\u201d that \u201cnature has somehow given them [.]\u201d\u00a0 Hurston was adamant that she was \u201cnot tragically colored.\u201d She insisted that \u201cno great sorrow\u201d lies \u201cdamned up in my soul, lurking behind my eyes,\u201d and she placed a world of distance between herself and \u201cthe sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
For what contemporary black commentator Larry Elder refers to as the \u201cvicticrats\u201d among us, Hurston had zero use.\u00a0 \u201cSomeone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,\u201d she remarked.\u00a0 Much to their chagrin, though, \u201cit fails to register depression with me.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, she stated bluntly that \u201cslavery is the price I paid for civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our increasingly joyless generation is oblivious to another of Hurston\u2019s insights: a sense of humor can bear most, if not all, painful things.\u00a0 Regarding racial discrimination, she noted that while she \u201csometimes\u201d feels \u201cdiscriminated against,\u201d she does not get \u201cangry\u201d about it. Rather, the experience \u201cmerely astonishes me,\u201d for how, Hurston asks, \u201ccan any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It\u2019s beyond me.\u201d<\/p>\n
As far as foreign policy was concerned, Hurston was of the old <\/i>right.\u00a0 She was what today we are inclined to call a \u201cpaleo<\/i>conservative\u201d or \u201cpaleo<\/i>libertarian.\u201d\u00a0 With the Russell Kirks, Patrick J. Buchanans, and Ron Pauls of the right Hurston had much in common\u2014especially when it came to foreign policy.<\/p>\n
Of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, she spoke contemptuously as she identified what Hurston took as their hypocrisy.\u00a0 Those \u201cpeople who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy,\u201d she asserted, \u201cwax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals [.]\u201d The fact is that \u201cwe\u201d also \u201cconsider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own.\u201d\u00a0 Roosevelt \u201ccan call names across an ocean\u201d for his \u201cfour freedoms,\u201d she added, yet he lacked \u201cthe courage to speak even softly at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Truman dropped \u201cthe bomb\u201d on Japan, Hurston referred to him as \u201cthe Butcher of Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Hurston blasted away at Big Government for domestic purposes as well. She was an adamant critic of the New Deal and jumped at the chance to support presidential candidate Robert A. Taft when the opportunity arose for Republicans to dismantle the house that Roosevelt built.<\/p>\n
A big part of FDR\u2019s legacy, Hurston complained, is that \u201cthe word \u2018liberal\u2019 is now an unstable and devious thing in connotation [.]\u201d\u00a0 What this means in practice is \u201cPinkos and other degrees of fellow travelers\u201d have succeeded in convincing large numbers of people that a liberal \u201cis a person who desires greater Government control and Federal handouts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taft, though, could put an end to this, Hurston claimed, for Taft is a real <\/i>liberal, a Jeffersonian<\/i> liberal.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Hurston found Taft\u2019s lack of charisma to be among his virtues, for she realized that those presidents who seduced the electorate with their charms were dangerous to liberty.\u00a0 Taft, she thought, was more like \u201cthose men who held high office\u201d before \u201cthe mob took over\u201d with \u201cthe advent of Jacksonian democracy [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
An opponent of segregation, Hurston was just as much of an opponent of federal efforts\u2014like Brown v. Board of Education\u2014<\/i>to end it.\u00a0 She was bewildered by the idea that, as a black person, she should take comfort in the fact that there was now \u201ca court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
Race relations in the South, through the \u201ceffort and time\u201d of those who live there, <\/i>\u201cwill work out all its problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
In short, Hurston was a devotee of liberty. <\/i>She relished in her individuality while courageously discarding the collectivist, utopian fantasies of which the twentieth century was ridden:<\/p>\n
“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.\u201d<\/p>\n
During this Black History Month, all lovers of liberty would be well served to follow Hurston\u2019s lead.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
February is Black History Month.\u00a0 As those on the right (and even an increasing number of people elsewhere) know well enough, these four weeks are all too easily used by activists as an opportunity to promote a politics of victimhood congenial to a leftist agenda. The famed black writer\u2014and conservative\u2014Zora Neale Hurston, frustrates this program.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n