How It Feels To Be Colored Me, By Zora Neale

In the essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, author Zora Neale Hurston writes to an American audience about having maturity and self-conscious identity while being an African American during the early 1900’s through the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance. Hurston expresses and informs her audience about how she does not see herself as a color, and instead sees herself as all she is made up of on the inside. Her primary claim is that she is not “tragically colored” and she should not have a single care about how the world reminds her of how she should act about her race. Her essay chronicles her personal experiences in being an unapologetically colored woman and creates the argument that she should not ever feel self-pity for being black. She utilizes her personal anecdotes and weaves them with metaphors, analogies, and rhetorical questions in order to create an immersive experience for the reader. Furthermore, Hurston engages the reader with her slightly sarcastic, strong, and blissfully positive tone effectively creates a way with words that communicate her claims in an entertaining way.

In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” Zora Neale Hurston expresses her feelings about being colored and uninfluenced by segregation. Hurston grew up in the Negro town of Eatonville. She had not been exposed to segregation. She had not known she was colored until she was thirteen years old. The only experience she has with white people were natives on horses occasionally and northerners passing through.

During a time where African American literature was fueled with racial segregation and pride in ones race during the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston offers a different and controversial approach with her literary work “How it feels to be colored me”.(13) In the works Hurston uses several colloquialisms, anecdotes, imagery and figurative expression to invite the reader on an adventure filled with pleasure. The poem takes the reader from the beginning of the Hurston’s childhood back in Eatonville, Florida into adulthood in Orlando, Florida. Hurston proves that overcoming racism can be accomplished by uniting the public and ignoring the visual difference in a person’s outer appearance. Hurston’s strength, individuality and resilience scream

However, at different times, she knows she is colored. In the essay she expresses that she feels most colored when thrown against a white background (Hurston, Page 2, Lines 6). For instance, at Bernard she feels her race, besides the water of the Hudson (Hurston, Page 2, Lines 8-11). The extended metaphor might seem like a simple symbol, but it is more than that, it is a life symbol as the color of our skin doesn’t really distinguish all that much. Sure, we might have different beliefs, families or hobbies, but we still are similar in the

Racial Difference Between Humans Our opinions on people are shaped by our views and values, which naturally leads to preferences to some over others. In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” Hurston uses an ineffective metaphor for race. The primary focus of the essay is to indicate the relationship and differences between blacks and whites. The metaphor suggests that people are all the same like the bags, but a little bit different because of our color just like the color of the bags.

The Scramble for Africa can easily be defined as the forced invasion and division of African countries among European superpowers. Those powers included Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. Each superpower wanted control over a certain area on the continent and would do anything to ensure that their area remained in their best interest. To bring the conflicts to the forefront, the countries participated in the Berlin Africa Conference in 1884-1885. In this conference, the issues of Anglo-German relations and everybody’s control in Africa were discussed. As a result of the conference, European control began to overtake the African continent and imperialism became a giant part of the European mark. In his book, “Worlds of Color” W.E.B DuBois discusses the idea of whole colonial enterprise stating that the problem the world faces is the color line. This can easily be interpreted as Dr. DuBois giving the idea that if World, more specifically European superpowers stop viewing the color line and Africa’s color line as something less than them a lot of the world’s issues could be detected and fixed. But more importantly, Dr. DuBois is stating that without the Worlds of Color, European industrialization would not exist.

Being Different When you are in a crowd of people, do you ever feel you do not fit in? The essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston, shows how a person can feel different just by being in a new place. The essay was written in 1928 during a time when there was a lot of racial discrimination between whites and blacks. The setting was in the Deep South, Florida.

In Homer's The Odyssey, he portrays Odysseus, the hero of the story, as clever and brave. Nobody wants a hero to lose so Homer gives him admirable traits so that readers find themselves rooting for him. On the other hand Polyphemus, the monster, is made to be hostile, beast-like and dimwitted. He makes Odysseus look brave and heroic.

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.

Racial bias and discrimination have historically constricted African Americans from living free and prosperous lives. Especially, in America’s Progressive Era when “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” happened to be published. This groundbreaking essay, written by Zora Neale Hurston, provided African Americans with a unique approach to defying racial discrimination. Namely, Hurston’s unique defense from societal discrimination is in her steadfast optimism towards the limitations of being African American. Therefore, Hurston’s essay achieved more than bringing hope to African Americans it also provided a solution in this period of bitter adversity. This is what distinguishes Nora’s essay from other literary works because it focuses on modeling a beneficial mindset rather than listing the hardships that black people are subjected to. Zora Neale Hurston is an influential role model for African Americans, she argues that racial discrimination and unjust biases can be overcome by having pride and optimism in the progression of one’s race.

I. Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” was a writing that was one of the brightest representatives of the period, “The Harlem Renaissance”. Zora Neale Hurston supported the same rebuff against white culture as her male counterparts, however, made it in her own manner - to focus on the problems of the ordinary level (in other words, she described the everyday experience of African American people). Her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” describes the life of a girl who was living in a small town called Eatonville and was forced to move into a boarding school in Jacksonville. Since that time she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, was now a little colored girl” (Hurston 153).

For my core reading I chose “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” The audience for this essay and for the core reading is not only me, my instructor, and my classmates but any reader who is wanting to know more about racism from someone's personal experience or just wanting to know more about racism in general and wanting to not only learn about the occurrences but the effects it had on both black people and white people. The time that this was written was around late 1940s and early 1950s. The first “cases” of racism were in the 1930s and carried on until around the mid 1950s and 60s when segregation began to end. The purpose of this essay is to not only inform people of segregation and racism from a personal experience but to put out others inputs

At time she states she feels that she simple doesn’t have a race and is merely herself. “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored” (Hurston, vol. 2, pp. 360). At the end of the short story she uses a metaphor: “I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of

In the fight for equality, people of color often feel isolated and separated from those whose privilege reinforces their oppression. However, there are and always have been white people who see the inequalities that are practiced in society and speak out against them in hopes of reaching equality for all. Langston Hughes used his voice in poetry to express his experience as a black man in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement, and his is a household name. There is no doubt that his words have power. The reader expects to feel his experience and gain empathy and understanding through his poetry. In his poem, “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes presents his experience of American life in a powerful contrast to the experience

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.