Their Eyes Were Watching God Thesis

In the novel, Their Eyes were watching God, Zora Neal Hurston drew attention to a controversial topic in the identification of biracial people. Growing up, Janie lived with her grandma and grew up with the Washburns children. She supposes she is white like them until she sees a photograph and understands that she is black.“So when we looked at depicture and everybody got pointed out there and there wasn’t nobody left but a real dark girl with real long hair standing beside Eleanor. Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark girl as me … Ah looked at depicture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so I said ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!” (8).Janie is an outsider to herself for a long time, not aware of who she was and what was her character. It

The time dates back to slave owners began to intermingle with their African American slaves.With a specific end goal to protect the purity of the Caucasian culture and defend slave owners from having to supply their half black offspring patronage, society developed a legislation throughout the 1600s to classify and black/white biracial individual as black. “This became known as the principle of Hypodescent or the premise that black blood is considered a contaminate to pure white blood (one drop rule) (Jackson). Inside of this same time period, controversy started to emerge which depicted those of a black/white biracial individual as socially risky because of their mixed heritage. Soon, theories rose in the 1800's setting biracial people above blacks on the racial chain of importance. “Their white blood had mulattos viewed as a more intelligent and capable than blacks granting them certain privileges in slave times” (Jackson). A break between the interracial and black group started, which created the risk of acceptance of biracial children inside of the black community. A change followed during the Civil Rights development and the biracial group grasped and embraced their black heritage as they united with the black community to battle for equal rights. This development urged biracial people to take pride in

For those people who have a biracial heritage might have issues adapting to the numerous threats of their racial identity that can be activated by the absence or presence of whites and/or minorities in their environmental and social surroundings. In an experiment, methodologists reported that “minority/white individuals stated that the racial composition of their environment, social identity threat for their component racial identities, overall feelings of belonging, and racial identification over a 1 week period” (Wilton). Biracial population also uncover how racial classes are shaped in view of physical qualifications to keep up status differences between races. Specifically, the white population started to pinpoint how such racial qualifications have been established to sustain domination and entitlement in among high status. With the socially ineffective historical 'one drop lead' any individual with an African American descent was promptly categorized as black to guarantee that biracial individuals would be named a lower class status to safeguard the social and financial power. Along these lines, for a biracial people of every racial backgrounds, racial identity is a complex and multi decided procedure that is impacted