Rhetorical Analysis Of How It Feels To Be Colored Me

The first paragraph of “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” serves to characterize Hurston’s self-identity—it establishes her individualism and highlights the fact that she fully accepts her blackness. Unlike many other black Americans, Hurston believes that her blackness does not bring shame to her—she claims that she is the only black person in the US to not have tried to mitigate her blackness by claiming to be related to an Indian chief. The first paragraph prefaces Hurston’s attitude toward the subject matter of the essay; the frank and unapologetic tone she utilizes in the first paragraph establishes that she does not pity herself for being colored. The first paragraph captures my attention because Hurston’s claim that she is unlike other black people makes me want to read more. To me, her candid tone makes her appear more trustworthy and her essay worth reading.

Hurston counters the argument that black people have been given “a lowdown dirty deal” by nature and that their past defines who they are now. She is colored, but not “tragically colored”—she is unapologetic about her race. She believes that her accomplishments, not her race, define her, but at the same time, she is not ashamed of being black. Her ancestors

The effect of comparing the end of slavery to the beginning of a race is that it clarifies why Hurston believes that it is pointless for black people to dwell in the past—African Americans who believe that they are defined by their ancestry will be slowed down in life in the same way that runners are slowed down in their race when they look back at the starting line. However, the events that occur at the starting line set the “runners” into motion, so they are important, but it is also important to let go of the