Zora Neale Hurston Institutionalized Slavery

Since the middle passage, which is the transfer of Africans into racialized slavery as an institution, the history of America has been intrinsically related to race and thus created the ontological condition of the black body as socially dead, meaning they have no value in society. The black body has been decimated physically and spiritually. Zora Neale Hurston articulates the binaries in the black community and its role in society through instances of internalized prejudice, westernized sexism, and de facto segregation within the black community.
From the slave ships to American ghettos, the black body is divided partially due to the hatred they have internalized from the slave master and learned from the social deprivation they face because

Who want any lil ole black baby layin’ up in de baby buggy lookin’ lak uh fly in buttermilk? Who wants to be mixed up wid uh rusty black man, and uh black woman goin’ down de street in all dem loud colors, and whoopin’ and hollerin’ and laughin’ over nothin’? Ah don’t know. Don’t bring me no nigger doctor tuh hang over mah sick-bed. Ah done had six chillun— wuzn’t lucky enough tuh raise but dat one—and ain’t never had uh nigger tuh even feel mah pulse. White doctors always gits mah money. Ah don’t go in no nigger store tuh buy nothin’ neither. Colored folks don’t know nothin’ ’bout no business’ (Hurston

As a people, their oppression is a ruse of analogy; it transcends the labels “man” and “woman” because those binaries are created by westernized man and functionally continues anti-black sentiments by continuing to analogize how the black suffers. Towards the middle of the novel after Mrs. Tony, an acquaintance of Joe Starks, begs for food for her children, Janie comes to the defense of her when Starks and his friend Coker began to speak badly about women. Joe’s response to her comments were, “‘You gettin’ too moufy, Janie… Go fetch me de checker-board and de checkers.’”(Hurston 89) Adopted by the oppressor, a stereotypical social belief was that women are inferior beings and not worthy of intellectual thought. Joe Starks symbolizes this in instances where he speaks to Janie as a subordinate; because of the pressure put on black men to be hyper-masculine, they then force themselves into “maleness” thus mimicking the role of the colonizer, not manifesting it. Because black bodies cannot access a gendered lense, they have to pretend to be what they are not. As shown through Hurston, this does not make blackness or black maleness any closer to whiteness. It creates unwarranted and detrimental binaries that allow for the perpetuation of abuse in the black