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Essay on Significance of Black Women's Status in Society
In contemporary writing, the question of ‘race’ remains one of the most complex and difficult to handle. Certainly, many leading writers in the post-war period have worked explicitly to combat the ideologies of racism, exploring their expression in the atrocities of American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust. At the same time, however, it is not difficult to find instances in which notions of racial identity and racial community are affirmed by writers in apparently positive and affirmatory ways. There is a paradox here which needs to be understood.
For more than half a century, the vast majority of scientists and sociologists have agreed that the notion of ‘race’ is so problematic that it can no longer be regarded as a useful term. As an ideology, racism can be traced to the middle of the nineteenth century, when it developed in association with debates over colonial expansion and the abolition of the slave trade. A century and more later, in the postcolonial period, though, race-thinking has been almost universally rejected by writers and academics.
Zora Neale Hurston's first significant publication, the short story "Drenched in Light," which appeared in Opportunity in December 1924, was autobiographical in more ways than one. Hurston had written into the story her past as a girl in Eatonville, Florida, and she had given to her protagonist, Isie Watts, a set of habits and aspirations she would later describe as her own. But she could not have known when she wrote the story how much the conclusion would come to seem autobiographical as well. The way that Isie is picked up and cosseted by a patronizing white traveler oddly predicts the way that Hurston herself, arriving in New York hard on the heels of "Drenched in Light," was virtually adopted, first by Fannie Hurst and then by the grimly philanthropic Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason......
