How It Feels To Be Colored Me By Zora Neale Hurston

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What is one able to say about Zora Neale Hurston’s approach to identity after having read her essay “How It Feels to Be a Colored Me”? I believe that this is the question that comes to everyone’s mind after the striking reading. Certainly, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary work is determined by the issues of racial identity in the United States and the florescence of African-American culture in the 1920s widely recognized as the Harlem Renaissance. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is an expression of the interactions between constructing American terms of whiteness and blackness which are necessary for defining the emergent social norms. However, these social norms and racial distinctions are obscured, thus Hurston’s approach is rigidly based on her cultural experience as well as on her pride of being an exceptional individual who finds her strength and wisdom despite the fact that the society strives for categorizing people due to their racial heritage. …show more content…

The moment of discovery occurred when at the age of thirteen she realized what it meant to be black and that the racial dissimilarities played an immense role in American society. What is more, this revelation demonstrates the writer’s concept of being “colored” as a result of social context. Nobody is born black; the society creates the notions of race and how it ought to be perceived by others. When she was living in Eatonville, the thought that she possesses a certain set of characteristics that create racial distinctions has never crossed her mind. Hurston states: “I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county- everybody’s Zora”. However, leaving Eatonville equaled to the transformation which depended on remote theories of race: “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored

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