Zora Neale Hurston was often criticised for focusing her stories within African American communities where a comparison of racial differences didn't/wouldn't come into play. The criticism was that therefore she did not address socially and literarily relevant racism in the United States. One question an interviewer might ask Hurston is: "Why did you make the choice to focus on life within African American communities instead of depicting the interaction between African communities and the non-African American communities surrounding them?"

Another question an interviewer might ask relates to Hurston's choice to use dialect in the dialogue between characters while writing the narrator's voice in standard English. An interviewer might ask: "If the purpose of using dialect is to elevate African American dialect out of derogatory stereotype, then why would you choose what might be considered a judgement-invoking Standard English speech for the omniscient, uninvolved third person narrator?"