Their Eyes Were Watching God and Its Contemporary Lens

 Deborah White

Professor Harris

Engl 2017

2 May 2022

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Its Contemporary Lens

Through a contemporary lens, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston can be interpreted as the struggles black women go through in order to be heard in life, in the media, and in history. 

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, main character Janie is constantly suppressed and oppressed as she tries to express herself. Through being forced into marriages she did not want, her voice in reference to her love and sexual life was taken from her. She leaves Mister Killicks in order to have her own voice in her own love and life, so she follows Joe Starks. Soon after, as Joe Starks becomes a figurehead in town, Janie once again loses her voice and her say in issues, instead becoming a trophy wife, of sorts. She is forced to hide her hair, stay inside, and do as Joe Starks says.

Today, black women are still suppressed and spoken over. Malcolm X is quoted in May of 1962 saying, “The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” That still stands true fifty years later, and we see it in the disproportionate sexual violence black women experience, the silencing and shadowbanning of black women on social media, and in the stereotyping of black women on television.

America sees this silencing of black women in the disproportionate sexual violence against black women. According to the American Psychology Association’s Black women, the forgotten survivors of sexual assault, “More than 20 percent of black women are raped during their lifetimes… Black women were two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than their white counterparts… Black women also experience significantly higher rates of psychological abuse — including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control — than do women over all.” 

Black women are continually silenced on social media platforms, especially TikTok, and their erasure from peoples’ feeds are even more prevalent when these black women are speaking on social justice topics. TikTok user Onani Branda in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, talks about how her videos pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement were not garnering the same amount of attention non-related videos were getting, especially not from a following of over 100,000. She is quoted in Time Magazine’s These TikTok Creators Say They’re Still Being Suppressed for Posting Black Lives Matter Content saying, “I still have those two videos up and they’re some of the least viewed on my account… I’ve never privated them, but 60-70% of their views come from Personal Profile, meaning users would have to actively seek them out to see them. My followers are not seeing them.” In this and similar ways, black female voices are being silenced in social media. 

Television relies heavily on stereotyping for all black characters, but it is even more prominent and narrow-minded when it pertains to black women. In That's Not Me I See on TV . . . : African American Youth Interpret Media Images of Black Females, an article that outlines the negative impact of the portrayal of black women on television, the authors explain the lack of diversity in the characteristics chosen for black female characters,

Characters and popular culture icons are often crafted on the negative racial stereotypes of Mammy—the asexual, happy, obese, dark-black mother figure; Jezebel—the shameless, oversexual, schemer; and; Sapphire— the rude, loud, and overbearing emasculator… These historical caricatures have been transformed into contemporary distortions: the welfare queen, who is sexually promiscuous and schemes for money; the video vixen, a loose woman; and the gold digger who schemes and exploits the generosity of men… (Adams-Bass et al., 2014)

Once again, black women are silenced as their individuality is stripped away from them and they are forced into narrow-minded, misogynistic, and unrealistic categories, thus portraying to black youth that is all they will ever amount to. 

As Janie is silenced and suppressed by her grandmother in forcing her hand in marriage and her second husband in controlling her looks and activities in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, black women are still suppressed and silenced today in social media, television, and through the sexual violence tehy endure daily.