Richard Wright’s scathing attack on Hurston as a retrograde writer set a pattern not of discourse but of dismissal. There were those who saw this satire without the least bit of humor. In print, black satire made its way into the 20th century through works like Langston Hughes’s “The Ways of White Folks” (especially the transcendent story “Slave on the Block”), George Schuyler’s “Black No More” and much of the folk tales and tomfoolery recorded and recast by Zora Neale Hurston during the Harlem Renaissance. One of the first homegrown national fads to go global, the cakewalk anticipated the paroxysms of twerking that would follow, whose late adopters like Miley Cyrus might be forgiven for missing the deep irony in the form’s black origins. They mistook the dance for a poor imitation rather than a dark mirror. In that moment of mockery, the cakewalk was born, but this parody had a catch: The slave owners loved it. African-American satire has been alive at least since the first black slave made fun of her putative masters and their manners.
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