How It Feels To Be Colored Me, By Zora Neale Hurston

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Martin Kange
English 2308
March 3, 2014
Mrs. Keck
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
In 1928 when Zora Neale Hurston wrote “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” it was not very common for a person to freely speak about how racial discrimination was not bothersome to African Americans and it certainly did not reflect the way most had felt towards racial discrimination. Hurston spoke of when she was growing up in Eatonville, Florida and how, “white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there” (Hurston, par. 4). In this essay she explains how she does not let all of these injustices continue to be bothersome to her whether they happened in her past or in the present, she does not let these injustices keep her from living a virtuous life.
Hurston outlines her life a young black girl who took a positive attitude in life after her dad ships her off to stay with her brother. It was her induction into the white world. Eatonville was an all-black town so for Hurston she never got to experience what it was like to be discriminated against for her ethnicity until she was thirteen years of age when she had to move to Jacksonville, Florida. She had to go to Jacksonville, Florida for school because there was a family issue that had come about. Being in Jacksonville she starts to become more attuned to the racial discrimination that was so much a part of our lives in that era. She speaks about how she does not let the discrimination that she is exposed to affect her in a negative way and she uses it to her advantage to make her a stronger person than she was before moving to Jacksonville. She uses figurative language to show how she feels about injustices between the two races. An example that she uses is wh...

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...ows that just because your skin color is different from someones doesn’t mean you know what the person is like. If all the contents in each bag were emptied out, then re-stuffed, we wouldn’t know which bag had what. This suggested that peoples’ different races varied in their human character and personality.
To her there was more to life than letting the small things, such as the words that people might have spoken to her, get to her and make her feel bad about her life just because of the color of her skin which she had no control over. The important thing is that she was able to keep her own identity throughout the whole situation. Her essay was her way of showing that she had self-pride and also pride in African American heritage as well. Throughout her writing, Hurston was able to challenge people to try and think outside the box and not be so simple minded.

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