Question

Analyze the major themes of the essay "What White Publishers Won't Print" by Zora Neale Hurston.

Answer 1

The major themes explored in "What White Publishers Won’t Print" are racial discrimination against minorities by white Americans and how publishers at the time wouldn’t publish the literary works of minorities unless they involved some stereotypical racial conflicts:

They [publishers] will sponsor anything that they believe will sell. They shy away from romantic stories about Negroes and Jews because they feel that they know the public indifference to such works, unless the story or play involves racial tension.

In her essay, Hurston attacks the illogical perceptions of minorities by white Americans. For example, she describes their lack of interest in learning about the “internal emotions and behavior of the minorities.” She states some stereotypical views that white Americans have toward minorities and how they feel that African Americans and other races are not intelligent, civilized, or moral:

Yes, he certainly knows his higher mathematics, and he can read Latin better than many white men I know, but I cannot bring myself to believe that he understands a thing that he is doing. It is all an aping of our culture. All on the outside. You are crazy if you think that it has changed him inside in the least. Turn him loose, and he will revert at once to the jungle. He is still a savage, and no amount of translating Virgil and Ovid is going to change him. In fact, all you have done is to turn a useful savage into a dangerous beast.

Hurston also describes how white Americans perceive African Americans as animals who can mirror the (white) American lifestyle but cannot comprehend or blend into it.

Step-by-step explanation:

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Answer 2

Hurston argues that the American society has misapprehended black people, even to the present day. And it's not because it is hard to understand and accept black people, but because the white majority is entirely indifferent to them. They don't care about black people's preoccupations, struggles, internal problems. And it isn't only white Americans who employ such an attitude. It is also colored immigrants and people of other ethnicities who join in.

Hence the misconceptions about black people. They are still being perceived in the context of their former slavery. They are almost never seen as heterogeneous population, where there are educated and uneducated, skilled and unskilled. Thereby the white majority reinforces the ancient narrative that blacks don't even deserve education, as it won't improve their inherently corrupt nature

The media don't help either. Their portrayal of black people is uniform. Of course, their work is commercial, and they won't make stories that don't sell. But that only means that the general audience is not interested in ordinary, everyday, human stories about black people. It is not only a snobbish perspective; it is a socially detrimental perspective which excludes a huge population which is a part of America.