How It Feels To Be Colored Me By Zora Neale Hurston

What is one able to say about Zora Neale Hurston’s approach to identity after having read her essay “How It Feels to Be a Colored Me”? I believe that this is the question that comes to everyone’s mind after the striking reading. Certainly, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary work is determined by the issues of racial identity in the United States and the florescence of African-American culture in the 1920s widely recognized as the Harlem Renaissance. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is an expression of the interactions between constructing American terms of whiteness and blackness which are necessary for defining the emergent social norms. However, these social norms and racial distinctions are obscured, thus Hurston’s approach is rigidly based on her cultural experience as well as on her pride of being an exceptional individual who finds her strength and wisdom despite the fact that the society strives for categorizing people due to their racial heritage.

The perception of being “colored” is introduced to readers at the beginning of the essay when Hurston reminiscences her childhood.

The moment of discovery occurred when at the age of thirteen she realized what it meant to be black and that the racial dissimilarities played an immense role in American society. What is more, this revelation demonstrates the writer’s concept of being “colored” as a result of social context. Nobody is born black; the society creates the notions of race and how it ought to be perceived by others. When she was living in Eatonville, the thought that she possesses a certain set of characteristics that create racial distinctions has never crossed her mind. Hurston states: “I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county- everybody’s Zora”. However, leaving Eatonville equaled to the transformation which depended on remote theories of race: “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored

girl.”
Furthermore, the fragment on The New World Cabaret displays Hurston’s approach to identity and oversimplified racial images even further. While listening to the performance of the jazz orchestra, she is embraced by various colors as she can feel the spirit of jazz music, thus it speaks through her body and soul. She claims: “I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow, and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum.” This jazz music and its African roots wakened a sense of freedom within her. She felt unstoppable; she did not let the scars of slavery to define her as she believed that the past should stay in the past if we do not want it to affect our future. Hurston definitely discerns the differences between black people and white people at the moment. She also chooses to neglect these differences as she perceives herself as “a brown bag of miscellany” because we are all unique in our own way, and a racial status should not be the matter that confine us. Hurston issued an appeal for people to embrace their individuality and make it their power.
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” Zora Neale Hurston indicates her discovery of the racial identity. The fact that she is not overwhelmed by the need to prove herself in a white-dominated society is incredibly stimulating. She says: “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. (…) No, I do not weep at the world- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” She is able to overcome a narrow-minded way of acknowledging the racial identity by becoming “the cosmic Zora” who is not defined by race or time. Her approach to identity consists of metaphysical experiences which allow her to comprehend the means of expressing the inner self without the pressure of social norms.