In her essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston mentions what she calls the "sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal." The essay describes the ways in which Hurston revels in who she is and how her black identity is an aspect of her overall remarkable character. Hurston's reference to a "sobbing school" seems to take particular aim at Harlem Renaissance writers (the essay was written in 1928), such as Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, who wrote about the difficulties of living with a black identity in Western societies, particularly in the United States. In the 1930s, Hurston had a rather rancorous public debate with Richard Wright over the purpose of Black literature. Wright hated Their Eyes Were Watching God for its sexuality and for its refusal to deal with the elements of protest, which he thought were essential to Black literature. Hurston's works, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God, deal with racism as a peripheral circumstance in otherwise rich black lives—it is not a central theme.

Hurston's use of the term "Negrohood" suggests that this group of writers has sequestered themselves in blackness as though it were a condition. Indeed, the suffix "-hood" describes a condition or a state of nature. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois introduced the concept of "double-consciousness," or the sense of two-ness—being both American and Black—that develops in the psyches of African Americans. Double-consciousness is both an awareness of one's individual self, but also an awareness of how one is perceived specifically due to race. Hurston's reference to "Negrohood" seems to be a reaction to DuBois's understanding of black identity as a condition that black people must learn to manage instead of as a source of joy.