Zora Neale Hurston and the Curious Power of One

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston describes herself as “a crow in a pigeon’s nest” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. For Hurston, the metaphor illustrates her singular perspective as an atypical presence in what she considered a stereotypical environment—or, put differently, the difference her presence made in a dominant space. Katherine McKittrick describes metaphors as “observational scaffolding.” Observational scaffolding functions as both a signal and a map, highlighting sites of struggle and liberation along the continuum of life’s experiences. Therefore, this article engages with discourses on decolonization and Black feminist epistemologies, acknowledges the differences between Hurston’s and today’s anthropology, and challenges other disciplines and fields to reconsider how values such as democracy and justice might influence engagement with Black knowledge production, specifically from Black women.

1. Introduction

Being the first at something is excellent at times, especially when your hidden work becomes public in accolades and recognition. For Black women scholars and thinkers, firsts are part and parcel of their academic and non-academic legacy. Some situations attempt to dull their shine, such as having one’s achievements omitted from history, being denied by White colleagues, being discredited by a biographer, and being erased from disciplinary considerations. Yet, as they have refused to allow the system to beat them, generations of Black women scholars have followed in their footsteps and blazed their own trails of firsts.1

Zora Neale Hurston enters the room, reveling in being a first and considering the ramifications of that standpoint. Hurston dwells like an anchor inside Black scholars across disciplines. Her influence is pivotal because her ability to boundary-cross positions her as a muse or representative of a legacy apex in literary and anthropological spaces (McClaurin, 2001). Walker’s (2003) gradual discovery of Hurston led to a recognition of ‘what is essential in life, what is nutritious, and what gives strength, balance, and happiness’ for Black people. McClaurin (2009) believes Hurston’s “spirit walks with me.” Therefore, whatever avenues Black scholars, particularly Black feminist anthropologists, took to learn about Hurston’s work, foreground her genius, and undo her erasure made them better scholars.

This article aims to accomplish two tasks. First, it deliberately centers Hurston, a Black woman scholar, who is generally researched as an outside Other, to further explore the ontological and epistemological intersection as an introduction to the ways of being an educated Black woman in perceived sacred spaces, including predominantly or historically White institutions (PWIs/PHWs) like colleges and universities. Black women scholars moved Black people and their bodies from research objects to knowledge producers. This shift placed the complex reality of being Black in the public space and the academic sphere. McKittrick (2021, p. 3) argues that the shift from studying science to examining the ways of knowing opens room to explore how Black thinkers “imagine and practice liberation as they are weighed down by…biocentrically induced accumulation by dispossession.” The centering is not extensive. It does not elucidate all the various analytical angles or concepts in Hurston’s catalog of work. Instead, the following pages are a condensed version of a larger work (several in fact) that continues the discourse regarding the importance of Black women scholars and thinkers, specifically as departments and disciplines remain disproportionately Eurocentric and male.

Second, this article argues that Hurston’s knowledge production can generally contribute to interdisciplinary fields when introduced broadly and, more specifically, when working within or with Black communities. According to McKittrick (2021, p. 3), the weight of dispossession foisted upon Black people exists not only in created knowledge systems but in every aspect of their lives inside and outside the academy, including their psychological and political well-being. Understanding its impact is essential to “noticing the physiological work of black liberation,” tied to corporeal and affective labor. Foregrounding Hurston’s work provides an opportunity to advance cognitive justice by dismantling Eurocentric monocultures of knowledge. Thus, Hurston’s 1920s–50s pursuit of cognitive justice is a cornerstone of present-day academic decolonization work by Black and Indigenous scholars because she engaged with the unknown and the underlying concerns that inform research practices. Although grounded in an understanding of plantation politics—more specifically, monocultures of knowledge—this article offers a concise overview. Hurston’s work is an analytical paradigm for explaining social control and structural violence from a marginalized perspective. As such, it presents Hurston as an opening to pedagogical change in other fields by extending an invitation to do what it has not done: to permit Black people, specifically Black women, into what has been perceived as a sacred space.

2. On Cognitive Justice and Monocultures of Knowledge

Black scholars and thinkers, including women such as Anna Julia Cooper, Lorraine Hansberry, the Combahee River Collective, Leith Mullings, Faye Harrison, and Lynn Bolles, have published scholarship and advocated for cognitive justice—a more purposeful integration of Black knowledge production into predominantly White spaces (Bauchspies, 1998; Bagu, 2019).2 However, credit for the concept has been given to Visvanathan (2021), who describes it as “a dialogue of epistemic system and a democratization of knowledge,” defining it as the “right of different forms of knowledge to exist as long as it sustains the midst and livelihood of a people.” Democracy is a value made manifest in the inclusive process articulated in the Gettysburg Address: “of the people, for the people, by the people” (Lincoln, 1863; Blain, 2024; Rountree, 2026).3 It applies in the same manner when Black thinkers methodically integrate the value of Black existence into their scholarship, thereby revealing and reflecting on the inner lives of Black people and the impact of proximity to Whiteness on their lives. This thoughtfulness lies at the core of cognitive justice as a praxis.

By explicitly centering marginalized theories in dominant spaces, knowledge diversity becomes a method for fighting against genocide and extinction. It requires a willingness to include the commoner [read: the “every” person] in a discussion that capitalizes on their knowledge and participation, as they are central to reimagining democracy’s true nature. As a praxis, cognitive justice is an engagement with other ideas to achieve knowledge diversity, an outcome of the diversity of lives that exist beyond science. The result speaks to a plurality that interfaces with memory because there are multiple ways of storytelling, including folklore and myths.

Baldwin (2011, p. 96) described being Black in the United States as a “receptacle of and vehicle of, all the pain, disaster, sorrow, which white Americans think they can escape. This is what is really meant by keeping the Negro in his place.” For Chinua Achebe, rectifying the story erasure he believed occurred when European colonizers arrived in Africa was the motive behind writing his bestselling novel Things Fall Apart. He states:

I knew that something needed to be done. That was my place in the world, my story—the story of myself, the story of my people. I was already familiar with stories of different people…having an English education and encountering accounts and events and people. At some point, I began to miss my own. Think of it as a gap in the bookshelf as though a book had been taken out.

(PBS NewsHour, 2008)

From his perspective, cognitive justice requires recognizing that gaps exist on the bookshelves, specifically in stories that reflect the colonized population’s point of view. The gaps demonstrate a persistent narrative legacy of Black inferiority; thus, they are rectifiable only when filled with works written by the ‘common’ Black person’s hand or spoken from their mouth (Wa Thiong’o, 2005; L. T. Smith, 2012; Morrison, 2019; Mills, 2021). In other words, removing Blackness from Whiteness’s proximity because it can selectively choose not to face the repercussions of the White invention does not negate or displace the denial that persists because of it.

Marable (2000, p. 31) and Santos (2008, pp. ix–xx) suggested that eradicating Eurocentric monocultures of knowledge to produce ecologies of expertise is more about an appreciation for the transformative power that comes from dismantling institutional racism through a “radical perspective” that begins with an assumption that “racism exists not merely at the ideological level, but has become an integral factor” in U.S. political and social hierarchical construction.4 Monoculture is a horticultural and economic term that refers to the cultivation of a single plant species (coffee, sugar, tobacco) to the exclusion of other plant varieties and diverse landscapes. The single plant is marketed as life-giving and sustainable but operates as a parasite that thrives on destruction. Some monocultures can transition into polycultures; however, most seek to maintain their market standing. “Monoculture requires eradicating life…Quantity of life comes before quality of life. […] Monoculture’s power, then, is its ability to breed not just a dearth of biological difference across landscapes, but a creeping in-difference to the radically uneven impact of capitalism on ecologies, identities, and planetary life,” writes Besky (2017). In other words, a monoculture aims to become a polyculture only if it controls the market, especially production rates and labor quality. Where there is supply control, there is a lack of responsiveness to demands for diversity. Thus, by capitalizing on individuality and disregarding complexity, monocultures asymmetrically impact systems (read: ecologies) and individuals (read: identities), turning groups into objects of economic gain by making the market about controlling mass production rather than societal health and well-being (Besky, 2017, 2022).

If Eurocentric monocultures of knowledge drive social control through the violence of servitude, placelessness, and constraint, the plantation system depends upon the singularity of dominant thought, dehumanization, and the internalized perceptions of inferiority among those relegated to the Other (Squire, 2018; McKittrick, 2011; B. C. Williams, 2021). When applied to the academic space, Black scholars have confronted their departments and fields about lean conditions, held them accountable through Black scholarship, and worked to reclaim the misrepresented and underrepresented concepts and ideas of Black communal experiences. Thus, as Hurston will find, there are on-campus instances in which the responsibilities of the university do not measure up to the three essential duties of investigation, interpretation, and inspiration that HBCU founder Mary McLeod Bethune placed upon them; so, they take on another perspective, mainly when it contributes to maintaining White supremacy or paternalistic ideals as viewed through the lens of a marginalized person in a dominant space (Evans, 2008; B. C. Williams, 2021).

Universities emerged as institutions perceived as exemplars of social mobility. Yet, it was the Black community that became a space where many Black women scholars and thinkers, such as Hurston, found inspiration, interpretation, and investigation.

It was the genius of the Negro which had invented the steam engine, the cotton gin, the air brake, and numerous other things—but the conniving white men had seen the Negro’s inventions and run off and put them into practice before the Negro had a chance to do anything about it. Thus the white man got credit for what the genius of the Negro brain had produced. Were it not for the envy and greed of the white man, the Negro would hold his rightful place—the noblest and the greatest man on earth. The people listening would cheer themselves hoarse and go home feeling good. Over the fences next day it would be agreed that it was a wonderful speech, and nothing but the God’s truth. What a great people we would be if we only had our rights!5

(Hurston, 1942, p. 181)

While some Black women sought to maintain their private lives in the public sphere, others purposefully positioned themselves as bridges between the academy and the community, which often negated the distinction between the private and the public (Higginbotham, 1993; B. C. Cooper, 2017). This bridging positionality reveals another perspective on Black women’s responsibility to space reclamation. The community showcases the everyday Black “genius” outside the hallowed halls and campuses of universities. It was important for Hurston to point out those for whom the privilege of the university experience would not be possible. In this way, she and others contribute to the bridge that links and expands their capacities to provide for communities inaccessible to the academy, giving them a broader perspective on their community members and their membership in a complex diaspora (A. J. Cooper, 1892/2016).

3. A Crow in a Pigeon’s Nest

Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeon-hole way of life. […] It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Negro idiom, nobody didn’t tell ‘em, but they heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of pigeon-holes. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon’s nest. I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a palace.

(Hurston, 1942, pp. 25–26)

Zora Neale Hurston described herself as a crow in a pigeon’s nest. She used metaphors as an observational methodology to explore how her relational positioning in various environments, specifically those she sought to liberate from the singularity of thought or experience, shaped her understanding and way of being. Reading across her works, a pattern emerges when the gaze shifts. Her usage of dialect in short stories, like “Drenched in Light” (Hurston, 1924/2020) and “Possum or Pig?” (Hurston, 1926/2020) and longer narratives, including Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Hurston, 1927/2018) and Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston, 1942), sits in the local vernacular, signaling to the audience that the locale does not need identification. It is evident from the beginning of the story that the writer is in a place where the gaze mirrors hers.6 She understands and is understood because the community has made room for her. Yet, when the dynamic shifts or the gaze is interrupted, Hurston introduced race into her descriptions, as in her inclusion of “Negro idiom” in the epigraph. This emerging pattern is essential as readers work to comprehend how Hurston maintains her core identity of a crow in a pigeon’s nest.

McKittrick (2021, pp. 11–12) states that metaphors serve as concrete “observational scaffolding” to signal and map the materiality of sites of struggle and liberation, thereby suggesting a future on a continuum of what is lived, living, and not yet experienced. In this way, metaphors are both analytical and figurative devices that allow for the processing of Black life by providing space for its signaling and liberation praxis (McKittrick, 2006, 2011; Cole, 2016, p. 71). Observational scaffolding functions as both a signal and a map, highlighting sites of struggle and liberation along the continuum of life’s experiences. Observational means to view or perceive in a situational manner, which could be active or passive, and dependent on the researcher’s distance or proximity to the researched. Often used in architecture, scaffolding is a temporary support system used in the construction, maintenance, or repair of human-made structures, designed to assist in moving between levels. In education, educators employ scaffolding techniques to support students’ learning as they develop new concepts or skills. The final goal is to remove the scaffolding as students become more independent in their learning and thinking.

In the opening sentences of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston (1942, p. 1) states that to fully appreciate who she is in the present requires engagement with the time and place she comes from to accurately “interpret the incidents and directions” of her life. The first chapters detail her all-Black hometown of Eatonville, Florida, and its adjacent all-White counterpart, Maitland; her parents and their roles in the community; and her birth and naming. She writes about herself in the final pages of chapter three, observing that even though it took her longer to “get on with the business of walking,” once she learned to do it, there was no stopping her, despite her mother’s chagrin. Hurston’s free spirit alarmed her mother, who opined that an enemy of hers sprinkled “travel dust” on their doorstep when Zora was born, as opposed to considering it was in her nature, similar to that of her father, who “didn’t have a thing on his mind but this town and the next one” (1942, pp. 22–23). In essence, Hurston was always going to carve out a life beyond the limited boundaries of her circumstances.

The expansiveness of Blackness is best understood when metaphors advance and animate arguments about its relationship to itself and the rest of the world. Hurston’s inclusion of how learning to walk opened unlimited potential provides her readers with additional insights into how she would adjust to, or approach, other possible limitations placed on her life. It is important to remember that Hurston is reflecting on her upbringing while speaking to the broader cultural understanding of Black family dynamics when she asserts that “grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got proof” (Hurston, 1942, p. 25; Morrison, 2019). She writes that time and circumstance permitted her a different approach to a world of information and knowledge than what was offered to her ancestors and parents.

Educational, economic, and social mobility were occurring. Like all intergenerational dynamics, regardless of ethnicity or race, the differences developing between children and their elders brought about a disruption to the manner of life they (the elders) had grown accustomed to living. However, Hurston noted societal differences when she inserted race into the narrative, thereby shifting the gaze. This shift acknowledged that Hurston recognized that Black elders lived constrained lives because of the information they lacked, because they were not permitted to learn it (Hurston, 1942, p. 25). Hurston’s generation—those born during the post-Reconstruction Era--did not have to simply accept the information passed on to them or exist within the boxes assigned to them simply because they were Black people. Thus, when she says that she questioned everything, Hurston clarifies the relational and generational dynamics at play in this decision.

In chapter four, the observations about the dynamics present a critical and unique distinction between pigeon-holes and pigeon’s nest, specifically regarding the conceptualization of restriction and liberation (Hurston, 1942, p. 25).7 The pigeon represents a limited person, in whatever capacity. A pigeonhole is a restrictive classification method meant to keep an individual or object in a specific category so they cannot be viewed any other way (e.g., only and forever a pigeon). It is a form of social control through stereotyping. The idea comes from a mathematical principle: if you put a pigeon in a hole but have more pigeons than holes, at least one hole will contain multiple pigeons. It is up to the classifier and object sorter to determine which pigeons are assigned to their designated holes (Yu, 2020). Thus, Hurston revealed several keen facts about social control.

First, an outside force, the “gods of the pigeon-holes,” set up the categories and the classifications. Given the classification structure and hierarchy, it is common knowledge that the gods cannot be questioned, whether by children or pigeons. Children can mean literal children. Every pushback served first as a means of social control and, secondly, as a reminder that adults build statues of those who please them while disregarding those who do not (read: the unproblematic child or the one who flies under the radar) (Hurston, 1942, p. 26).8 The pushback is an automatic reaction meant to quell the changes taking place within and, thereby, disrupting the “pigeonhole way of life” that permitted adult ways of doing to remain unchallenged. For children like Hurston, pushback only intensified curiosity. Her unquelled curiosity sparked anger and frustration in authority figures, often wielding “the broom of anger [to] drive off the beast of fear” because they did not know how to defend their reluctance to further their education (Hurston, 1942, p. 26). Hurston mulls over the presumption about children—those who push against the norm and the everyday—when she muses about there being something wrong with them, even though the issue is not with their curiosity or questioning. With this metaphor, Hurston announced that she and other children who question do so cognitively, even as they recognize that, in many instances, they might be the only ones, which makes them stand out (Hurston, 1924/2020). There are times when these commonalities outweigh the differences, but when differences (i.e., race and gender) overshadow the commonalities, what was previously a factor becomes the issue.

When it comes to pigeons, though, Hurston’s use of race signals the difference; thus, inserting a double entendre for those who do not possess the authority of, or access to, the pigeonhole gods and their classification system. For Hurston, the pigeons in her world will be Black, less educated, socioeconomically poor, Southern, etc., so they will have a look and air about them. These were her people, and she did not care about the stereotypes associated with them or her via association. Hurston writes, “It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Negro idiom, nobody didn’t tell ‘em, but they heard,” suggesting that the interactions between Black adults and questioning Black children cultivate a tension that acknowledges the ways knowledge is gained and changed over time (Hurston, 1942, p. 25). Those who inquire of Whiteness and its relationship to Blackness—as to better comprehend it—are met with irritation because ‘that’s just the way it is,’ ‘it has always been,’ or ‘I said so.’ Second, Whiteness had to become reliant upon Black people’s constraint to maintain the categories and classifications; therefore, if there are no questions, there are no disruptions to the manufactured way of life.

For many Black communities, knowledge was passed down to the old folks (read: grandparents and ancestors) through stories and songs, reflecting griot and plantation cultures through kinship because access to the education that White people had was denied or limited, depending on the historical context. Therefore, they were told, heard, and accepted the information without questioning: knowledge passed intergenerationally. Old folks differ slightly from grown people (parents and other older adults) because they “know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got proof,” which speaks to the evolution of knowledge within the post-Emancipation Black community. Woodson (1933, pp. 5, 7), in The Mis-Education of the Negro, asserts that the modern education (before 1933) Black people received was highly flawed because it equipped them to “begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man” as Black people were “dismissed as a nonentity” without culture, contributions, or history (Du Bois, 1903/1994; Schomburg, 1925/1992). However, despite their miseducation, Black people always made a way to share information and knowledge, whether through Black newspapers, enslavement narratives, Freedmen’s Schools, or historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): information shared through experience and proximity. Metaphorically, it is not the pigeon’s place to challenge, and to do so is to step out of place. The pigeons cultivated a nest and learned to operate within the confines of a hierarchical classification system, designed to ensure they were never viewed as anything other than pigeons. However, Hurston has self-identified as one who exists outside the classification system and, thereby, undeterred by notions of place when questions are obligatory.

Put another way, like Achebe decades later, Hurston noticed the gaps and demanded that they be filled. Interestingly, Hurston could become a crow because those around her were classified as pigeons. More than that, it speaks to the willingness of the environment to cultivate her growth as a crow, even among those perceived by outsiders (the gods of the pigeonholes) as pigeons. Not only does Hurston refuse the pigeon label and the associated containment, but she also resisted attempts to classify herself (and Black people) as monolithic by self-labeling as a crow, which is just different enough while maintaining general avian family characteristics. Her conscious decision to remain a bird is key to elucidating her need for belonging. It also broadens insights into her methodology, even in environments meant to constrain because they were not built for someone like her.

Although she would not identify as a “race woman” as described by Carby (1988), Hurston’s embodied discourse and positionality within the academy align with B. C. Cooper’s (2017) description. Cooper’s articulation of race woman arises from Pauline Hopkins, who declared in 1902 that it was the “duty of the true race-woman to study and discuss all phases of the race question” (B. C. Cooper, 2017, p. 11; Dworkin, 2007, p. 142).9 Like Hopkins, Black women, including Hurston, positioned in the public sphere, identified themselves as intellectuals and thinkers, even as no one else did. For B. C. Cooper (2017, p. 3), embodied discourse refers to the “textual activism [of Black women] wherein race women assertively demand inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working-class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak.”10 In other words, because of her life and scholarship, namely as an advocate for the “every” Black folk-person, Hurston’s embodied discourse makes it possible for readers of her works and observers of her life to comprehend the activism within textures of her life as directly related to and on behalf of herself and Black people, and most specifically, Black women.

With this embodied activist stance, Hurston would have conflicted with, or in contrast to, prominent male “race leaders” of the time who were purposefully identifying the old Negro from the new Negro. Hurston defended the seemingly defenseless pigeons against the pigeonholes society wanted to force them into, with this one act. By describing herself as a crow in a pigeon’s nest, this aspect of her core identity served as a direct counter to the pigeonholes created for and designed to contain the assumed stereotypical pigeons. Simultaneously, Hurston deconstructed the intraracial social hierarchy within the Black community by modeling the importance of intergenerational communication as a means of knowledge transmission and communal cohesion. As she did when qualifying the differences she had as she learned to walk, Hurston asserted that since she was a child, her differences have caused her to stand out. Embracing her role as a crow meant disrupting the normative environment, or the pigeon-hole way of life, by making a ruckus within the daily banalities, as in when maintaining a sense of order and decorum were the rules of the day (A. J. Cooper, 1892/2016; B. C. Cooper, 2017; Higginbotham, 1993; Arendt, 1963/2005).

Understanding Banalities

Hurston is a crow within the Black community pigeon nest, and in the academic space pigeon nest. Consider the nest as the disciplinary reliance upon White theories, founders, and canons, in addition to Eurocentric research methods and praxis. Hurston (1942, p. 143) saw research as a “formalized curiosity” that pokes and pries with a specific purpose of “seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell within.” In Hurston’s assessment, curiosity and purpose--intending to draw out of the depths the secrets and the lives within them--must be at the core of research; thus, if there is a deficit in any area, there is a condition missing in research’s meaning and goal. Her presence in the academy disrupted the nest’s banalities, which are foundational components of an educational structure that upholds White supremacy as both a social institution and cultural contract. The use of banalities leans heavily on Arendt’s (1963/2005) work and analysis of Eichmann during his trial.

Arendt argued that Eichmann’s response to the banalities of the day (and his job) cost millions of Jewish lives because he refused to question the authorities and his comrades’ behaviors. In fact, Arendt boldly stated that it is not only his refusal to question but his inability to think about questioning—the “total absence of thinking,” which constitutes the banality of evil (Arendt, 1963/2005, p. 114). If Hurston’s writings were applied to comprehend better the banalities contained within monocultures of knowledge as identified as disciplines and fields, she would argue that they continue because there is a

lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negro, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor. This lack of interest is much more important than it seems at first glance. It is even more important at this time than it was in the past. The internal affairs of the nation have bearing on the international stress and strain, and this gap in the national literature now has tremendous weight in world affairs. National coherence and solidarity is implicit in a thorough understanding of the various groups within a nation, and this lack of knowledge about the internal emotions and behaviors of the minorities cannot fail to bar out understanding. Man, like all the other animals, fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign. […] Argue all you will or may about injustice, but as long as the majority cannot conceive of a Negro or a Jew feeling and reacting inside just as they do, the majority will keep right on believing that people who do not look like them cannot possibly feel as they do, and conform to the established pattern. It is well known that there must be a body of waived matter, let us say, things accepted and taken for granted by all in a community before there can be that commonality of feeling. The usual phrase is having things in common. Until this is thoroughly established in respect to the Negro in America, as well as of other minorities, it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex.

(Hurston, 1950/2022, pp. 143, 146)

The root of segregated knowledge is a lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of Black and other non-White peoples. In other words, Eurocentric monocultures persist because institutions support the White belief that they know all they need to know about other populations based on what they witnessed from a distance, whether in performance, distress, or passing.11 Whiteness’s lack of knowledge comes to the forefront when situations of national affairs and international stress force the country into the spotlight. How can the government stand on principles of unity and solidarity when no interest has been taken in knowing about those within the borders with whom there are few presumed commonalities? The same question can be asked of disciplines and fields. Hurston calls out the “gap in the national literature,” confronting the trickle-down effect of leadership decisions and their generational implications worldwide. More specifically, she addresses the concept of injustice by noting that without even considering [read: Arendt’s total absence of thinking] how a Black person in America [King’s turn-of-phrase, explaining the dilemma] feels and reacts inside, pattern conformity [the banalities of life as usual] continues as something taken for granted, because Black people do not have the luxury of not considering others, specifically about how White people think and what they know (J. M. King, 1967/2010).12 At the same time, she suggested that disruption is possible if someone in the White community determines to think and feel differently about the past and present implications of not thinking and learning about the racially marginalized Other in America.

Arendt found that Eichmann did not ask questions. More importantly, he did not even fix his mind to generate questions. The questions seek to interrupt the narrative and the hierarchy, because without interruption, there is a risk of maintaining the status quo.

4. The Crow and the Pigeons

Hurston’s crow presence occupies space in two geographies: the Black community writ large and, specifically, the citizens of her Eatonville hometown, and the academic space of the 1920s–1940s, both broadly defined. Geographies refer to the relationship between Black people and the physical world. These geographies are spaces saturated with sensations and ways of knowing. McKittrick notes that geographies have a humanness because they speak, providing narratives about a sense of place (or lack thereof) and movement (as it relates to progress, mobility, and voyaging) (McKittrick, 2006, p. ix; Brand, 1997). Contextually, Hurston writes, lives, and researches during the rise of the New Negro Movement, the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance. Black thought leaders emerge as race leaders to rally to collective around throwing off the imagery associated with the past, particularly enslavement, and millions of Black sharecroppers and other escaped the South and Jim Crow laws for the North and West (Du Bois, 1903/1994; Locke, 1925; Carby, 1998). To Eatonville’s Zora, no matter how far away from home she traveled, she would always return home.

Women’s Studies professor Evans (2008), in Black Women in the Ivory Tower, acknowledges that Black women were the last to gain access to a college education, situating them 200 years behind White men, 40 years behind Black men, and 25 years behind White women by 1841. Perkins (1983), in “The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,” notes that a similar curriculum existed for Black students, regardless of gender, and that it differed from that in White schools. At the turn of the 20th century, Black students sought admission to PWIs, not only to attend HBCUs (A. J. Cooper, 1892/2016; Carby, 1998; Higginbotham, 1993). They were permitted with limited admission, which served as a measure to keep them in their place (E. Anderson, 2022, 2015; Evans, 2008). Although the law of the land was “separate but equal,” as demonstrated in Plessy v. Ferguson, White students commingled with Black students outside the service roles they had been assigned. Like her description of her childhood experiences in Jacksonville, Hurston reflects on the maintained distance in the department and the field when considering authentic engagement with Black people. Like her childhood relationship to adults, the Black students who self-selected to participate in integrating college campuses—the crows—would have been identified as hypervisible individuals within their department or field, even though they were part of a collective.

Hurston noted that she appreciated attending both a historically Black College and University (HBCU) and a PWI, despite the distinct differences between the college environments (Hurston, 1942, pp. 129–141). She described her experiences at Howard University (HBCU), including her interpersonal relationships with fellow students she called “swanky,” even as she joined a sorority and the campus newspaper (Hurston, 1942, pp. 129–131; Rountree, 2024). Using this adjective, Hurston reminded readers of the socioeconomic differences between her and her classmates on an all-Black campus known for its collective intelligence. When Hurston left Howard for Barnard College/Columbia University (PWI), her presence in Franz Boas’s 1920s Anthropology department altered the culture, bringing to the surface what had previously been dominant and dormant (or latent). Building on his work with the Inuit peoples of Baffin Island, Canada, Boas’s perspective on culture shifted, particularly in the United States. His anthropology department was revolutionizing the field, especially as it related to the social construction of scientific racism and its implications on genetics and knowledge. Her integration into the ivory tower via Barnard College/Columbia University exposes that although PWIs opened their gates to Black students, the atmosphere was not conducive to full inclusion, initially attempting to establish her as a hyper(in)visible placeholder. What becomes more apparent in Hurston’s recollections is the insight she provides into her psyche, particularly as an individual forced to prove herself worthy of being in a space despite the overwhelming evidence that she possessed the qualifications to be there.

Barnard and Columbia were opened to Hurston but were inaccessible. The segregation, stereotyping, and supposition were not eradicated because a Black student was now commingling outside of the pigeonhole assigned to her. As directed by her professors, Hurston conducted anthropometric measurements of Black people on the streets of Harlem using calipers and planned to further this work in her subsequent field research in the South (Hemenway, 1980; Kaplan, 2002; Salamone, 2014). She aptly interprets her presence on campus as “Barnard sacred black cow,” a tokenized and hypervisible spectacle (Hurston, 1942, pp. 140–141; Baker, 1998, 2010; M. Anderson, 2019; C. King, 2020; Rountree, 2023; Baldwin, 2011; E. E. Williams, 2021). Hurston’s decision to use cow is significant, especially given its connotations in enslavement and folk culture and its 1925 implications. A cow is a (singular) member of a cattle herd (collective); the word, cattle, derives from the Old French word chattel, meaning possession (The Smithsonian Institute, n.d.). When connected to race as described in romance language conceptualization, Smedley (2011, p. 37) states that cattle emerged from domestic animal breeding customs because its original meaning has to do with “a breeding line of animals, a “stock” or group of animals that was the product of a line bred for certain purposes…for human cognizance of breeding animals dates well back into early agrarian communities.” Cattle breeding and reproduction work elucidates the dehumanization that enslaved women endured.13 What begins as a cheap investment in Black labor becomes a lie to absolve White people of willfully discarding the humanity of an entire group of people. It is a psychological compulsion that rationalizes the “merciless exploitation of those who have been defined by law as something less than human” through the removal of all rights that signify their humanity (Smedley, 2018, p. 149; G. B. Nash, 1982; Rountree, 2024). Thus, Hurston observed what she perceives is taking place: an attempt to own whatever Hurston reproduced because she’s pigeonholed as property of the campus, and to make her like them through acculturation.

The key to this plan is the singularity of her position on campus/in the space. She is away from the group (herd)—socially isolated. When Hurston arrived in 1925, the department was devoid of other Black students, Black faculty, courses about Black people, or White faculty researching Black people—a sanctity of space dedicated to White knowledge production. She stated that although there were no “lurid tales of discrimination,” she resolved not to press too hard to display her brains to White people, even if it meant she fell into the trap of believing they found her qualified (Hurston, 1942, pp. 139–141). Hurston revealed the attempts of her White community to define her using the same dehumanizing pattern employed during enslavement. In other words, Hurston was meant to be a tokenized, hypervisible public display that others, religiously [sacred], sought her out in a manner that reflects both the nature of a social outcast or a sideshow that insiders gawk at as a passerby and the level of work she had to do to exist in the space.14 Hurston’s presence in the department offered an initial opening of space for a more significant representation of Blackness within anthropology, even as one researcher in this Columbia University department. As a crow in a pigeon’s nest, Hurston existed inside and outside the prescribed spatial binaries for Blackness at the time. In this way, she proceeds internally, identifying and metaphorically moving from being a student (a pigeon or a product of the environment) to a position as a Black knowledge producer in the academic space. What should not be missed is that Hurston must enlarge the space by doing the heavy lifting alone.

On Placing Non-Academic Black Pigeons in the Academic White Pigeon’s Nest

I was glad when somebody told me, “You may go and collect Negro folklore.” In a way it would not have been a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surrounding, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.

(Hurston, 1935/1990, p. 1)

Due to the weight of dispossession carried by Black people because of their longstanding encounters with Whiteness, the goal of Black research differs from White research that is rooted in the sacredness of Whiteness—the sanctity of the statuary (Hurston, 1942, p. 26; Finley, 2017; Fanon, 1952/2008; Hall, 2017; Rountree, 2024).15 It is Hurston’s decision to place the pigeons in the palace among the marbleized statues of anthropology’s founding fathers (Hurston, 1942, p. 26). Black stories contain elements of the hidden. It is in the act of sharing that the story itself offers lessons in comprehending Black life in its complexities, not its description (McKittrick, 2021, pp. 6–11; Hurston, 1950/2022). To understand Black people and their relationship to geographies is to comprehend their relationship to Whiteness and violence within that physicality and its influence on perceptions of place and space (McKittrick, 2006, p. x; Wynter, 1971). The Black experience with Whiteness and violence does not exist as a monolith; therefore, it is necessary to exercise an interdisciplinary (texts, genres, disciplines, and histories) approach to explain and analyze the interplay and accept the knowledge productions that arise from undisciplined methods (McKittrick, 2021, pp. 4, 5; Gilroy, 1993). In his essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Schomburg (1925/1992) contends that Black research is a prime necessity that allows Black people to provide evidence that restores themselves against the social damage of slavery as a means of remaking the past to create the future. It is a corrective measure undertaken to overcome the breadth of “certain handicaps of disparagement and omission,” make known the “full story of human collaboration and interdependence,” and “educate any receptive mind” (Schomburg, 1925/1992, pp. 233, 237; Marable, 2000; Hughes, 1926/1985; L. Bolles, 2013).

Storytelling power within the Black community writ large and unexposed to White critique or influence held significant value to Hurston. Her concern was that once out in the world, others would not value them as she did. Brown (2015, pp. 36–37) suggests, “The best university scholars are characterized as entrepreneurial and investment savvy, not simply by obtaining grants or fellowships, but by generating new projects from old research, calculating publications and presentation venues, and circulating themselves and their work according to what will enhance their value.” In her role as a crow, Hurston disclosed the protectiveness of a Black researcher’s gatekeeping about inner lives and stories they collect due to the White predilection toward multifaceted intellectual violence, particularly when it comes to pigeons, also known as the researched Other.

In his 1934 introduction to Hurston’s Mules and Men (Hurston, 1935/1990, pp. xiii–xiv), Boas writes that Hurston’s work fills the “intimate setting in the social life of the Negro” gap in Black folklore that had captured American attention. He continues to remark on Hurston’s ability to accomplish this “unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro” which relied extensively on her ability to “enter into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them…and penetrate through the affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life.” To him, Hurston’s work is “valuable not only by giving the Negro’s reaction to everyday events, to his emotional life, his humor and passions, but it throws into relief also the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life, with its strong African background in the West Indies, the importance of which diminishes with increased distance from the South.” Hurston’s marginalized voice gave an authentic, reflective narrative on an intersectional existence and personal perspective, unveiling the monolithic barrier that often shrouds marginalized communities.

As a member of the African diaspora, Hurston believed storytelling and collecting stories were part of the cultural fabric. More poignantly, by collecting folk tales, Hurston has an opportunity to tap into the griot aspect of her African heritage. “Researchers must become familiar with the etiquette of the society they study. They have to learn how to formulate questions in ways that sound neither offensive nor intrusive. If they deal with slavery, they need to be even more tactful,” as Bellagamba et al. explain (Bellagamba, 2013, p. 13). Her recognition of this cultural fabric included stories of Brer Rabbit, his antics, and the supernatural reach of the Squinch (screech) Owl (Pasierowska, 2017). Her familiarity with these stories and the ideas and morals they introduced informed her vision of the world around her and her position within it. The worlds created through folktales shaped Hurston’s perspective in such a way that they nearly became a hindrance until she separated from them.

Hurston had grown into the stories, and unless she became liberated from them, their hold on her life would suffocate her. It is not that she had outgrown them; she needed to change how they shaped her being. As a discipline that studied how people and cultures interconnect, anthropology offered Hurston the perfect avenue to explore the interconnectedness of stories, Black knowledge, and culture. Many current anthropologists have expressed their feelings in the same way. Leith Mullings stated that anthropology mattered to her because it offered an opportunity to use theory and methods to uncover power dynamics and structural inequalities, all from the premise that circumstances like violence, war, poverty, and racism were unnatural; their emergence could be understood through historical and comparative analyses (R. J. Daniel Barnes, 2021).16 R. J. Daniel Barnes (2021, p. 38) distinguished anthropology from other social sciences because it offered an opportunity to explore the articulation of the Black experience by Black people. Yet, in a March 1928 letter to Langston Hughes, Hurston confided that her main concerns with the discipline of anthropology included acceptance of the “age of folklore” and whether others might value what she saw as “very good modern stories” (Kaplan, 2002, p. 112).17

Discipline is about empire. Disciplines differentiate knowledge and ways of knowing, a function of empire (McKittrick, 2021; Wynter, 2006; Said, 1993). It is in this vein that McKittrick (2021, p. 39) emphasizes, “Disciplinary thinking disciplines how we study identity as though identity is anachronistically and biologically fixed to corporeal matter, splitting otherwise collective black and indigenous struggles against empire, while also financially and geographically organizing studies of race by putting a merit-value on differentiated descriptions of premature death and misery that, inadvertently or explicitly, reify a system of knowledge that cannot bear black and indigenous life (and black and indigenous relationality)” (Marable, 2000; Lewis, 1973; Lutz, 1990; Mullings, 1997; F. V. Harrison, 2010; L. T. Smith, 2012; L. Bolles, 2013). Within Hurston’s Eatonville community, folktales are told by the drylongso Black person; therefore, sharing what Eatonville held and knew opened the residents and Hurston by direct association as “just Lucy Hurston’s daughter” to ridicule and their stories to epistemicide (Hurston, 1935/1990, p. 2; Gwaltney, 1980; Hurston, 1927, 2022a, 2022c, 1950/2022; A. L. Bolles, 2001a).

Hurston knew that folktales revealed a lot about the inner lives of the tellers and their communities. By using ethnography to elucidate the truth about Black people while relying on them to tell their stories—their folklore, as African griots—Hurston deviated from the pigeonhole prescription assigned to anthropology student researchers. The prescription is the imposition of the prescriber’s choice upon the prescribed. For the prescribed, the choice vacillates between bending the prescriber’s image or “eject [ing] the image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility (Freire, 1970/2000, p. 47). Freire (1970/2000, p. 47) contends that freedom is on the other side of the image ejection because freedom is “the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics: the white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.

(Hurston, 1935/1990, pp. 2–3)

Hurston’s approach was undisciplined. As a crow, she sought to free both the Black pigeons of Eatonville and the discipline of anthropology from the prescribed pigeonholes assigned to them. This choice is a calculated decision. It is this calculation that Hurston might have seen in reading Roche’s Historic Sketches of the South, and it is at the center of this reluctance that Hurston’s research and penning of Barracoon and Mules and Men begins. Although she was “green and feeling my oats,” Hurston met and interviewed Kossola Oluale for a first-person interview and article with the Journal of Negro History, led by Carter G. Woodson (Hurston, 1927, 1942, p. 144).

Hurston’s fieldwork followed Langdon Roche’s (1914, p. 8) Historic Sketches of the South, in which she noted that “it was only as a slave that the negro had been associated with other races […] when the existence of new lands became known and labor was needed for their development, the Negro’s native country became a hunting ground where he was not only stalked by the Dutch and Portuguese, but by the French and English who also had posts for that purpose in Africa. […] If the condition of the negroes in this world was altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next were greatly improved.” It is important to acknowledge several ideas from Langdon Roche. First, the newly discovered lands already existed. Second, the land discoverers were uninterested in participating in any labor; so, they turned their attention elsewhere. As Langdon Roche wrote, they [land discoverers] consider the continent of Africa to be one country. Africans were stalked and hunted from posts by Europeans with the express purpose of extracting them as labor. Finally, the belief that White European influence on Africans would result in a better life for them became a narrative that permeated the mindset of colonists and enslavers (Langdon Roche, 1914, pp. 6–9; Fanon, 1963/2004; Césaire, 2000).

Langdon Roche is an information giver categorized as a knowledge producer. Her book describes Black life in Africa and post-enslavement Alabama. Yet, there was no collaboration between Langdon Roche and Kazoola (her spelling), because while she included his American name alongside the other Americanized formerly enslaved people, it was not his story she told; it was, instead, her version of his retelling. Here is an unexamined banality. There is a segment of those researched who ask that their stories be told by another, but is it their honest preference, or something they have learned to acquiesce to because of an internalized sense of inferiority, given their second-class citizen status in knowledge production? It is difficult to grasp the “depth and dimension of the Negro dilemma…and what it means to be a Negro in America” because Langdon Roche did not engage the curse of skin color (J. M. King, 1967/2010, p. 109). The stories of the last surviving Africans from the Clotilde were filtered through a White historical lens and communicated in a single dimension for public consumption. Additionally, the retelling remained couched within the master narrative that enslaved Africans, brought from a warmongering kingdom, would have a better life toiling in America. As such, they remain Black bodies without.

In conjunction with plantation politics, Black bodies without require proximity to Whiteness to legitimate them. Hurston (1927/2018, p. 3) prefaces Barracoon by stating, “This is the life of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself. It makes no attempt to be a scientific document, but on the whole he is rather accurate. If he is a little hazy as to the detail after sixty-seven years, he is certainly to be pardoned” in direct contrast to Langdon Roche, who puts his name in paratheses, thereby attributing only a few lines to him, rather than the entire narrative. McKittrick (2021, pp. 32–33) writes, “The Middle Passage instituted a rupture and created a nonworld. The nonworld exists within geographic knowledges which are real and imagined and accessible through thought, making its inhabitants possessors of an unproven knowledge that cannot exist in the main text because they were “tasked to inhabit…imagine and live the world differently”(Glissant, 1990/1997, pp. 5–8).18 Hurston perceives and approaches Lewis as a knowledge producer.

As an academy representative, Hurston must thread the needle on Lewis’s categorization (McKittrick, 2016, p. 82; Rountree, 2024). Lewis is categorized as an information giver because, as a former enslaved person, he is not a person. He is a dehumanized Other or domesticated animal, tamed by his interactions with Whiteness through enslavement and degradation. His body has been territorialized, and his voice silenced (McKittrick, 2006, p. 44; Fanon, 1963/2004). He is the last person alive to tell the story of a life in Africa before White people came and stole him and others away, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and surviving in the hull of a ship, enslavement under the Alabama sun, and establishing a Black community that offered a bit of history in his present. He was the only one capable of telling the story. At his home, as she describes in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston permits Lewis, this “being,” who was previously silenced by his past of enslaved labor and the present reality of sharecropping and loneliness, to become human again (Hurston, 1937/1990, p. 1).

Neither Cudjo Lewis nor his story as Kossola Oluale were ever meant to survive.

To Hurston as a Black body with, Cudjo Lewis is also a Black body with. Cudjo Lewis’s being/essence extends beyond the AfricaTown boundary lines and into the Kingdom of Dahomey, where Kossola Oluale dwelt. Due to Hurston’s presence in his home, he becomes one who stands once again on the shoreline of the decision to recall that which has been pushed down and buried for protection, but is desirous of sharing. More importantly, his decision includes the survival of his Blackness, his subdued self, the aspects of his Black body that Whiteness attempted to tame. Although he is one, he represents many (Lorde, 2020, pp. 283–284).

With demands a recognition of possession; it is an antithesis of dispossession. L. T. Smith (2012, p. 21) concludes that decolonization engages with imperialism and colonialism on multiple levels, expressing concerns about addressing “underlying assumptions, motivations, and values which inform research practices.” This becomes evident when reading Roche, in contrast to Hurston, once readers comprehend the researcher’s positionality. In recognizing this positionality, Boas’s realization of Hurston’s importance to the intimacy of anthropological Black storytelling becomes more apparent, especially given racial dynamics and narrative transference. Hurston footnoted her article with her interview and use of “The Voyage of Clotilde and other records of the Mobile Historical Society” (Hurston, 1927, 1927/2018). Yet, Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, references William Stewart’s conclusion that insists Hurston plagiarized a portion of Roche’s material for the 1927 article after finding herself in a predicament she could not remedy (Hemenway, 1980, pp. 96–101). Thus, by applying a decolonized lens and placing Lewis at the forefront of the narrative about his life, Hurston quietly proclaims that Black people (and other marginalized peoples) possess a voice and can speak for themselves.

Liberatory storytelling differs from narrative practice because it demands confronting oppressive structures through rebellion or defiance of the status quo. Their voices occupy with, creating their spaces; therefore, they do not need or want White people to tell their versions of their life stories. It is purposeful in its illumination of cultures within a culture by extracting the storyteller’s identity as they possess it, rather than how the structures have imposed it. This illumination requires a commitment to the person or persons, not to the discipline.

With siloing, subjugated narratives, racist tropes, and stereotypic misgivings about Black people persisting uncontested, often forcing the Black experience to remain in identity-disciplines (i.e., African American, feminist, women’s studies) to retain control over the ways of knowing, McKittrick (2021, pp. 35–36) continues stating, “The canon, the lists, the dictionaries, the key thinkers, the keywords, the core courses, the required courses, the anthologies, the qualifying exams, the comprehensive exams, the core textbooks, the tests, the grading schemes and rubrics, the institutes, the journals, the readers. Core. Learning outcomes” (Christian, 1998). Put another way, the exclusion of Black voices from disciplines reinforces colonial acceptances about Black people and their ontological relationship to Whiteness, including notions about how Black people’s primitive nature makes them savages, beastly, and animalistic, seemingly prone to violence (Fanon, 1963/2004). In limiting access to additional educational resources, the goal of White supremacy through the everyday banalities, including the status quo and “us vs them” perspectives, remains concretized. Therefore, Hurston’s ability to occupy two geographies is essential to truly comprehending the power of her presence in revolutionizing anthropology under Boas.

First, she elucidated the narratives of Black people. More specifically, Hurston returned to the South and brought forward the stories of the unheard. She made room for Black communal folklore, oral history, and religion. Second, Hurston’s anthropological involvement coincides with her residence in Harlem during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In befriending and consulting with W.E.B. Du Bois and having Hurston as a student, Boas learned about Blackness and various ways to explain differences without dehumanization. Additionally, Hurston’s work confronted Black gender dynamics when Black people rebounded from enslavement and protected themselves from Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan. Mikell (1999, p. 51) writes that Hurston was “both a product and participant in the elaboration of the “new Negro” (Mikell, 1982) Finally, because of her placement in anthropology during the discipline’s revolution and Black life of the Harlem Renaissance, she implemented a new tool that undergirded her approach to art and science: her ability to be “in culture while looking at culture” (Mikell, 1999, p. 54; Lorde, 1984/2007; Clifford, 1988).

Hurston is an interdisciplinarian, but much of the current research on her seeks to elevate her works more considerably into the literary canon or challenge her anthropological sidelining. Few allow her to exist within both, to be considered as more than a folklorist or anthropologist. McKittrick (2021, pp. 4, 39) observes that interdisciplinarity is core to anticolonial thought, declaring that Black people use interdisciplinarity to challenge racism (Marable, 2000). This challenge of racism “unsettles suffocating and dismal and insular racial logics” as researching across textures offers “one way to challenge the primacy of evidentiary and insular normalcies” that persist even though they are contradictory to what can be learned through engagement (McKittrick, 2021, p. 4). Hurston’s methodology confronts the present disciplinary adaptation of participant-action research or mainstream methods because it occupied a method-making space that signals toward the “practice of Black life and livingness” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 44; 2006). This confrontation is not an all-out rejection of anthropology as a tool for exploring cultures. It is, however, a recognition that the same tools that built the master’s house cannot be used to dismantle it (Lorde, 1984/2007).

Hurston observes that she cannot rely solely on anthropological methods because they are embedded in anti-Blackness and the perpetuation of notions of Black inferiority. By being a crow in a pigeon’s nest, she offers a chance for White scholars of her time to free themselves from their misgivings and false knowledge transmission given to them, which has bound them to their privileged perception. Dismantling structural violence must be a collaborative process between Black and non-Black scholars and thinkers. Collaboration functions as an essential component of cognitive justice because it compels us to share what we know and track the transmission of knowledge (McKittrick, 2021, pp. 5–34; Locke, 1925; Marable, 2000).19 An undisciplined approach does not equate to an undisciplined praxis. In fact, McKittrick argues that Black intellectual labor—especially that which is collaborative--is highly disciplined in its quest to elucidate how Black people move through the world as expressions of liberation exist on a continuum. The need to utilize undisciplined methodologies and methods motivated by curiosity and inquiry to foster environments that practice undoing dehumanization by disassembling racism transdisciplinarily describes a disciplinary rebellion in which Black women scholars participate (McKittrick, 2021, pp. 39–49; Fanon, 1952/2008; Wynter, 1992, pp. 237–239; Davies, 2007; Brown, 2015; M. Smith, 2010, pp. 37–58; Daigle, 2019). Thus, while Cooper terms it embodied discourse, McKittrick identifies this liberation praxis as “mnemonic Black livingness” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 3).

McKittrick (2021, pp. 6–9) maintains that every avenue of Blackness is used to describe the indescribable, using songs, poetry, articles, books, and art created by Black people for Black people. To understand the concept best, it is necessary to take each piece as McKittrick explains. First, mnemonic, as in a literary device for remembering, speaks to the diasporic tendency to engage with words, music, dance, food, song, art, and the like as a means of disseminating Black ways of living and being. The second feature is Blackness, which, for centuries, has been positioned as inferior in the presence and absence of Whiteness (Mills, 2021). This notion of inferiority allows White supremacy to maintain its power as it is transmitted through narrative, embedded in cultural structures, and expressed in the social contract (Mills, 1997). Blackness is the dimension that makes the mnemonic useful; it is the essence upon which the devices attach. Lastly, livingness is the expressive characteristic that does more than reaffirm their humanity. It manifests a counternarrative in a world predicated on denying their existence (McKittrick, 2021, p. 7). The importance of mnemonic Black livingness in dismantling plantation politics and cultivating cognitive justice lies in the willingness of disciplines and fields to acknowledge that there has been a removal of the holistic Black experience, especially the discourse about the legacy and impact of colonization and enslavement on the United States and the world. Simultaneously, this removal has ensured an omission of how White supremacy, as the system upon which exclusion relies, continues unshaken due to banal activities, including a lack of thinking about how the continued exclusion feels (Arendt, 1963/2005).

5. Conclusions

By deliberately centering Hurston, this article has accomplished its two goals: foregrounding Hurston’s work as an opportunity to dismantle Eurocentric monocultures of knowledge by initiating cognitive justice, and presenting her as an analytical paradigm for explaining social control and structural violence from a marginalized perspective. Hurston’s embodied discourse pushed back against the implemented social control of anthropology and the race leaders of the time, who sought to limit access to what and who create Black knowledge production (McKittrick, 2013; Squire, 2018). Modern pursuits of cognitive justice are rooted in the decolonization movement efforts of Black feminist anthropologists such as Leith Mullings, Lynn Bolles, Faye V. Harrison, Christen Smith, and Dominique Garrett-Scott.20 Recognizing their work is essential to correcting the story, as Bolles puts it. Telling the story correctly requires contextualizing and foundational work to accurately center the contributions of Black women scholars to the discipline and the field (L. Bolles, 2013; Visweswaran, 1994; McClaurin, 2001).21 Various fields boast interdisciplinary scholarship and methods; however, Black scholarship, especially by women, remains woefully underrepresented.

Hurston’s crow in a pigeon’s nest example serves as an extended invitation to other disciplines and fields to disrupt the everyday banalities of Eurocentric monocultures and plantation politics by fully integrating Black people, especially Black women, into what has been perceived as a sacred space dominated by men and Whiteness (McKittrick, 2011, 2013; Squire, 2018). The academy has long missed Black women’s knowledge production. Yet, while there have been some gains for women’s voices of all racial backgrounds, “albeit [a] muted,” now is the time to begin the transformation process, specifically concerning Black women and their importance to interdisciplinarity (Mullings, 1997, p. xx; Hughes, 1926/1985; Marable, 2000).

An interdisciplinary lens is used to highlight the interlocking systems of oppression (or axes of stratification or articulation of multiple oppressions) that Black scholars face as a manifestation of racism’s ontology and hierarchy as introduced and maintained through White supremacy, because, as Mullings concludes, naming the oppression source informs the action plan (Mullings, 1997; Fanon, 1952/2008, 1963/2004; Freire, 1970/2000; Hill Collins, 2000). Racism’s most egregious crimes are the intellectual energy and time wasted in its theorizing about and constructing of human organization (Mullings, 1997; Finley, 2017). Many Black women scholars have called out their disciplines for scholarship omission, including Hurston with anthropology (Mullings, 1997; I. E. Harrison, 1999; A. L. Bolles, 2001b; F. V. Harrison, 2010; L. T. Smith, 2012; L. Bolles, 2013; C. A. Smith, 2021; Makhulu, 2022). As Black women research, write, and theorize from the margins, they are “creating an alternative body of knowledge about themselves and their communities, providing both a catalyst and guide for acts of struggle and advocacy” to position the Black feminine perspective and Black ways of living and being into perceived sacred White spaces where White knowledge takes center focus, or in spaces accommodating of Black male knowledge while White knowledge production remains the center (Mullings, 1997, p. 1; Combahee River Collective, 1974/2015; Davis, 1983; Hill Collins, 2000; Gregory, 2001; J. C. Nash, 2019; Crenshaw, 1995). In the vein that R. Daniel Barnes (2013) addressed her students after encountering anthropology, where Black scholarship existed on the periphery, asking, “Is this discipline for me?”, Black scholars question if other disciplines are as well.

Finally, Hurston’s crow also asks White scholars to notice within the academic nest. In this way, she challenges academics (and others) to consider whether the democratization of knowledge is occurring. If not, then identify and cultivate methods and praxis to overcome the ontological and epistemological proximity reinforced through the racial contract. Put in 2026 vernacular, “If you see something, say something,” and “Democracy requires all of us.” There is a lot of talk about purposeful representation and its effect on everyone; therefore, if Black scholars cannot see themselves in the faculty of colleges and universities, and if Black voices and perspectives are not found on syllabi and in curricula, is the answer not clear? The assertion is not that White faculty cannot teach Black students or Black subjects. Instead, it is as Marable (2000, p. 33) suggests when he finds that the movement toward transformation begins with correcting history, replete with “insights drawn from critical interpretations of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.” Perhaps other disciplines and fields have positioned themselves so that they do not recognize the deficiency; however, much like Hurston addressed in her essay, “What White Publishers Won’t Publish,” it is time to address what the issue feels like (Hurston, 1950/2022).

Arriving at transformation requires a recognition that Black people, their history, and their knowledge have been and continue to be constructed against the racial mountain (Hughes, 1926/1985; Marable, 2000). The racial mountain stands as a literal and figurative metaphorical obstacle that Black people must consistently work to overcome. Overcoming can feel like an endless effort, especially when faced with moderate White people who seek rules and tradition (or law and order) over justice J. M. King (1964). Therefore, where Black people have paved the way by theorizing on the margins and moving their knowledge production into the center through intra-racial citation practices, White scholars must determine to collaborate to establish a balance, thereby righting the imbalance that racism has enforced and maintained. Until White scholars desire and understand the expressive nature of liberation from a Black perspective, emancipation and freedom will be the closest we get, which is not enough. Emancipation from enslavement brought African Americans to freedom. During freedom, which is what we are supposed to have, we have endured Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, voter suppression, police brutality, and gentrification, to name a few injustices. Freedom has not eradicated the racial or social contract.

Thus, freedom is not the same as liberation.22