“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston has a lot of instances of racism, and race plays a very large role in the story. Hurston gives us a taste of what is was like to live in a black community during times of oppression, and she depicts the minority as a large community filled with stereotypical racist views towards whites. The story describes the positive aspects of the black southern culture, as well as the negative impact and trauma brought on by the oppression and slavery that occurred before the 20th century, which is when this story takes place. Janie, the novel’s main character, identifies as a black woman throughout, although she is genetically predominately Caucasian, since her father and grandfather were white. She still identifies as a black woman because she believes she fits in with the black community more than her white male ancestors’ community. Hurston bases race on culture more than the color of a person’s skin. Janie does not know what it’s even like to live in a white community, as she was raised in Eatonville and she continued to live there …show more content…
Although their lives were full of challenges and hardships, they had positive aspects as well. Hurston describes Janie in the following quote, "Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches." (Hurston, 8). She uses a metaphor again, and she implies that Janie has different “branches”, some containing good moments in her life and some with bad. Janie’s life apparently has more hardships than positive moments, yet she still embraces the “dawn” branches. She does not let the negative times in her life unmotivated her, as she continues to try until the end. More than half of the hardships faced in the novel were influenced by race one way or