Answer:
A beautiful metaphor to explain the necessity of a solid but vivid structure and a logic order while writing a speech.
Explanation:
The idea of thihes metaphor, like all metaphors, is to visualize the topic - in this case writing a speech - in order to have a clearer idea on how to proceed.
Following this methaphor we could start with the head and introduce the topic in a few sentences of well selected words. When you move downwards to the middle and extremities you might go into some more details, using the arms and legs as a means of subdividing your topic.
Your feet, obviously, are important to keep you on the ground and not get lost in airy idealistic observations.
And remember, the human body is a perfect machine and very lively.
Hurston argues that the American society has misapprehended black people, even to the present day. And it's not because it is hard to understand and accept black people, but because the white majority is entirely indifferent to them. They don't care about black people's preoccupations, struggles, internal problems. And it isn't only white Americans who employ such an attitude. It is also colored immigrants and people of other ethnicities who join in.
Hence the misconceptions about black people. They are still being perceived in the context of their former slavery. They are almost never seen as heterogeneous population, where there are educated and uneducated, skilled and unskilled. Thereby the white majority reinforces the ancient narrative that blacks don't even deserve education, as it won't improve their inherently corrupt nature
The media don't help either. Their portrayal of black people is uniform. Of course, their work is commercial, and they won't make stories that don't sell. But that only means that the general audience is not interested in ordinary, everyday, human stories about black people. It is not only a snobbish perspective; it is a socially detrimental perspective which excludes a huge population which is a part of America.
It is a narrative that serves as a metaphor
The three values I believe Americans hold are the most popular ones stated in our constitution, "life, liberty, and property/pursuit of happiness"
