Both Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes were writers who wrote of not only the struggles of African Americans but also wrote to empower African Americans to see themselves as great human beings and see their worth, despite what was instilled in their brains. Zora was an anthropologist, she studied the social, cultural and behavioral development of humans. The essay I am going to be analyzing by Zora is the 1928 essay “How It Feels to be Colored Me”.
In the essay “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora writes about the hardships that are associated with being black during her time. Zora starts off by telling the story of her early life. She doesn’t just narrate the story, she more so reflects on her childhood and in a way mediates her race in the story. In the story, she refers to herself as colored. This shows her recognition of self and acceptance of her racial identity. Zora writes that she grew up in Eatonville Florida which was an all-black community. She states that white people would travel through Eatonville the blacks that
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By this she means when she stands out, such as when she attended school at Barnard College. She also turns around and says she feels colorless in places like Harlem. Zora is saying this all to have African Americans accept their color and acknowledge that there will be times where they will feel singled out for being black and other times when color will not matter. She does not consider herself “tragically colored”, as she says in the essay. She prided herself in being black even during the times she was the only black person around. Her sense of race is affected by the environment she is in, in some places she doesn’t feel “colored”, and so she does not let it hinder her. She tries to get readers to see race and ethnicity as fluid and dynamic as opposed to static and rigid. She wants readers to