In her essay "What White Publishers Won't Print," Zora Neale Hurston argues that publishers will not print stories about educated minorities because readers will not believe that these people even exist. Would the person that Countee Cullen describes in his poem "For a Lady I Know" be similar to the kind of reader Hurston writes about? Provide textual evidence for you answer.

Yes, the lady in Cullen's poem is a deeply prejudiced and ignorant person, who doesn't want to really get to know black people as they are. Those prejudices seem to be so deeply engraved in collective memory that black people are associated with slavery, menial jobs, and intellectual inferiority. Hurston argues that media have the power to solve this problem. Hurston writes: "It is assumed that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes. Everybody knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum where all may take them in at a glance. They are made of bent wires without insides at all. So how could anybody write a book about the non-existent?"

Similarly, in Cullen's short and poignant poem, the lady believes that even in heaven black people will be assigned the same kind of duty that they have on Earth, in her opinion. It's as if they aren't capable of doing anything else, nor are they entitled to anything else above that.