In the high style, one’s loves never seem partial or personal, or even like ‘loves’, because white novelists are not white novelists but simply ‘novelists’, and white characters are not white characters but simply ‘human’, and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.
