How It Feels To Be Color Me Analysis

The essay “How It Feels to Be Me” by Zora Neale Hurston was written to make known her life of a young colored girl who lived in Eatonville, Florida. Zora, who grew up in an almost exclusively black town, had no problem with a person’s race, including her own. As a matter a fact, she preferred being colored. She says “It’s thrilling to think – to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame.” In Zora’s mind, the color of a person’s skin is merely that, nothing else. Towards the end, she elaborates more on her perspective of race. She refers to each race as a colored bag and herself a brown bag. Zora explains that each bag possesses its own content, which represents characteristics

Before laws were passed for equality, African-Americans had a difficult time coping with being undermined by whites. This led them to build their own communities and remain among their own. The story “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston was written in 1928, about her moving from a community of her own kind to neighbors who discriminated against her and her family. Though a person’s environment can affect how they see himself/herself or how others might perceive him/her, difficult times does not exactly mean that a person will become bitter or vengeful about it.

Characters, in Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, force the protagonist, Rachel, to choose between her white and black side. They only acknowledge her black side while only celebrating her white qualities. Consequently, Rachel feels the obligation to accept the roles that have been thrust upon her and ignores part of her race because of the commentary from her family and peers. Rachel adapting to the portrayal of her racial identity to appeal to the normalized opinions of her appearance, demonstrates her tendency to comply with the categorization people of color face throughout society. Ultimately, leading Rachel to pick and choose the parts of her racial identity that most please the people she is with.

“How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, a piece by Zora Neale Hurston, was written to allow readers to look through the eyes of a colored woman. Specifically, a colored woman living in early segregated America. Hurston described her experiences through emotion, credibility, reasoning, and appropriate timing. With these techniques, she clearly displayed pathos, ethos, logos, and kairos in her writing. Through these appeals, she successfully creates a strong case for her purpose in writing the essay. She intended to not only share her experiences, but to let readers perceive her emotions as well. Hence, the title stating how it “feels” to be her.

In Hughes poem “Note on the commercial Theatre” he started off with an angry tone, upset that African American music was used by the whites, but the African Americans didn’t receive the credit for the artistic work: “You’ve taken my blues and gone you sing them on Broadway” (1043). Furthermore, at the end of the poem Hughes does expresses a powerful ending, our culture is beautiful, but you will never be me: “Black and beautiful and sing about me, and put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be me myself” (1043)! Hughes poems focused on the urban cultures, while Zora Neale Hurston short story “How it feels to be Colored Me” focused on her as a woman who is discovering herself and her worth.

"How it Feels to be Colored Me" was written in 1928. Zora, growing up in an all-black town, began to take note of the differences between blacks and whites at about the age of thirteen. The only white people she was exposed to were those passing through her town of Eatonville, Florida, many times going to or coming from Orlando. The primary focus of "How it Feels to be Colored Me" is the relationship and differences between blacks and whites.

1. According to Bryson, what are the three different processes that resulted in your existence? Where in the essay does Bryson discuss each?

Even though both Hurston and Hughes grew up around the same time period, they had very different ideals regarding their experience as African American’s as well as a different voice used within their works to convey their ideals. Hurston in her 1928 essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” describes her childhood and coming of age with a delightful zest that cannot be contained. Although the essay does contain some dark moments such as when she describes her experience with her friend at the jazz club and the sudden realization of the racial difference between her and the other patrons, for the most part the work exudes her keen sense of dignity despite the popular opinion of the masses during that period. Lines in her essay such as “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes…I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it” (Abcarian, Klotz, and Cohen 812) beautifully express her sense of self dignity and refusal to give in to the negative energies surrounding her race. Despite the many hardships that the color of her skin caused her she was proud and determined to never let that stand in her way of

Zora Neale Hurston How It Feels to Be Colored Me is an autobiographical short story wrote in 1926. She takes us back to her childhood youth a time period when racism was prevalent. She

During the book, Black like Me, John Howard Griffin turned himself into a black man to experience the true discrimination of the south. His experiment is six weeks long. During these six weeks he experienced many different kinds of people in the south and how the treated black people. After he had finished his six week experiment he stopped taking the medication that turned his skin darker, which then turned him back into a white man. After all, some people dispute the fact that he actually experienced true treatment of a black man. I disagree with that that statement, because although he was only a black man for six weeks he still experienced the hardship that the black man faces every day of his life.

What Would I Do White? is a poem that not only emphasized how the African American Community viewed White People, but realized that they did not want to be like them. At the beginning of the last stanza there is a line which acknowledges that the Black Community registered that they “would do nothing” if they were white (Jordan, 101). This is significantly important because the start of the poem kicks off with a question. “What would I do White?” or what would I do if I was white (Jordan, 101)? June Jordan, the writer of this poem then continues giving uncomplimentary information about White Community. The second and third stanza contain the lifestyle that Jordan sees white people have during her time. She explains that not

In the winter there isn’t much color. The trees are bare, the sky is gray and everything is covered in white snow. Personally, I feel that winter is gloomier than summertime. I feel this way because of the colors surrounding us. The dullness of colors during the winter time seem to make things more bland and less cheerful. The bright colors from spring and summer seem to make most people happier and cheerful. Although, each color could have both a positive and a negative feel to it, it just ranges by the person who views it. People associate different emotions with different colors. Three categories I will be explaining are cool, warm and neutral colors.

The topic of racism is a very intriguing one for me. Other authors criticized Zora Neal Hurtson that she, being a black woman during the black liberation movement in the 1910’s, should be writing about black people being set free and how they are being suppressed by the world around them. Instead, Zora mainly deals with the issues of the women being suppressed and not allowed to be free. This idea itself mirrors that of freeing black people, but yet authors of the time were not able to see that, they called her book artificial and did not help them in their quest for freedom.

Color fills our world with beauty. We delight in the colors of a magnificent sunset and in the bright red and golden-yellow leaves of autumn. We are charmed by gorgeous flowering plants and the brilliantly colored arch of a rainbow. We also use color in various ways to add pleasure and interest to our lives. For example, many people choose the colors of their clothes carefully and decorate their homes with colors that create beautiful, restful, or exciting effects. By their selection and arrangement of colors, artists try to make their paintings more realistic or expressive.

Overall, results indicate that the manipulation of the color of questionnaire had no effect on mood. However, there was an effect of time of day on mood as well as an effect of gender on mood. The results did not support the main hypothesis that different colors would elicit different moods. Thus, this study found no support for the prediction that brighter colors would elicit positive moods, whereas less bright colors would elicit negative moods. These results do not support past research findings that brighter colors tend to elicit positive moods, whereas, dark colors elicit negative moods (Hemphill, 1996; Kaya & Epps, 2004). Moreover, this result was not expected given the previously discussed research by Weller and Livingston (1988)