If we view Barracoon as just another brilliant example of Hurston’s anthropological genius, we are gravely mistaken and we do not fathom the full import of her objectives as a social scientist. In her endeavor to collect, preserve, and celebrate black folk genius, she was realizing her dream of presenting to the world “the greatest cultural wealth on the continent,” while simultaneously contradicting social Darwinism, scientific racism, and the American pseudoscience of eugenics.
