How It Feels To Be Colored Me By Zora Neale Hurston

In Zora Neale Hurston's "How it Feels to Be Colored Me," she recounts her experience with discovering who she is. Through personal experiences, Hurston explores the challenges and struggles of race and identity, moving through society as a Black person. Hurston contends that while race is an important part of identity, it isn’t what solely defines her. She illustrates the idea that one's experiences with race are shaped by their environment and the people around them. From her experiences within this story, Hurston’s understanding of race and identity becomes more complex as she has to navigate how race comes to function in certain spaces. Hurston’s story explores the concept of pride in oneself and a journey of self-discovery that many of

With her lack of understanding of how race functions in a town unlike Eatonville, Hurston’s experiences here give her the freedom to be herself and find joy in life, despite what is happening in the outside world. Eatonville is a representation of a space where Hurston’s racial identity doesn’t exist, she was just Zora. However, Hurston’s move to Jacksonville prompts many life-changing experiences for her. She becomes Zora, the “little colored girl” for the first time and is introduced to a world of discrimination and segregation (Hurston 2). It’s now that Hurston becomes aware of her racial identity and how it functions within white America. Through her experience Hurston has to learn to navigate and understand the new world she is now occupying; understanding that her race is now a defining part of her identity. Hurston learns to understand this concept, but she argues that within a racialized world, race doesn’t define who people truly

We see many instances where Hurston feels “colored” and most of those cases are in the presence of white people. Hurston describes the feeling as being “thrown against a white background,” (Hurston 2). But like her argument within the whole essay she doesn’t let this struggle define who she is, she finds beauty within her Blackness while also continuing to live within her own identity of being Zora. She doesn’t let her race define her identity, but she understands that it will always be a part of her