What Is The Theme Of How It Feels Tyo Be Colored Me By Zora Neale Hurton

In her 1928 essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston argues that race isn't an essential feature that a person is built-in with, but instead emerges in specific social contexts. Hurston introduces this theme past describing her babyhood in the majority black town of Eatonville, Florida, where, until the historic period of thirteen, she was not yet "colored." It was but when she moved to the more diverse Jacksonville and later to New York City that she became aware of her race. Crucially, she also drifts away from this awareness at times, when "the cosmic Zora emerges" and she assumes a more than universal identity. In detailing a personal journey towards and and so away from a racialized conception of her ain identity, Hurston opposes the conventional wisdom of the time that race is an inherent characteristic that determines the personality, ability, and destiny of the individual. With time, she besides gains the confidence to recall of her race, which has and so oft been used as a weapon confronting African-Americans, as an asset.

Hurston becomes aware of her ain status as "colored" through recognizing her difference from white people. The moments when Hurston says she can most keenly "feel [her] race" occur when she moves from a black to a white customs, or when a member of a white community visits her own. This suggests that race is a social phenomenon—that is, something that originates in one's relationships to others rather than something that is essential to a person or group of people. Until the age of 13, Hurston doesn't consider herself "colored" because no 1 has given her cause to remember of herself in those terms. For Hurston, "white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there." Thus, immature Hurston conceived of race as more than of a socioeconomic stardom, a matter of differing circumstances, than an essential divergence between people. Nevertheless, race as a category begins to feel real when Hurston moves to Jacksonville, where at that place are more white people: "I was at present a piddling colored girl. I constitute information technology out in certain ways," she writes. Hurston goes from not identifying with a racial category to identifying with one completely, showing that race is no less "real" just because it is based in social perception.

Fifty-fifty as she considers her identity every bit a black adult female, with fourth dimension, Hurston gains the power to minimize or refuse the concept of race. She frames this using the metaphor of the pocketbook, the near crucial aspect of which is non its advent merely what it carries. She analogizes the varied contents of a bag to aspects of a personality, both positive and negative: "A start-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass." Hurston's point is that the exterior of a bag doesn't affect what it contains, and in this way she uses the metaphor to gainsay pop conceptions of race as something that determines one'due south intelligence, talent, or identity.

Later on in her life, Hurston likewise learns to lean into her African-American identity, even when this identity is maligned or mocked past both black and white acquaintances. As a child, the forced sensation of herself every bit "colored," a little girl "warranted not to rub or run," makes her visible every bit a target of racial bigotry and command. As an developed, she begins to view this racial visibility as a stardom. That Hurston feels she can control not simply whether to identify as African-American only whether that identity is positive or negative, in disobedience of wider culture, illustrates the importance of perspective rather than biology when thinking through race. She opens her essay by invoking a stereotype nigh African-Americans: "I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother'south side was not an Indian principal." In a tongue-in-cheek way, she'south pointing to what she sees every bit a trend on the office of African-Americans to minimize or dilute their black by inventing a dissimilar ancestry for themselves, thereby challenge a dissimilar cultural and indigenous heritage. To "extenuate" something is to make it seem less offensive—more forgivable—just Hurston argues that African descent needs no such apology. She undercuts the idea that her race should be a source of shame and pointedly shows that she embraces information technology fully.

Furthermore, rather than shying abroad from the persistent stereotype that people of African descent are somehow more "primitive" than people of European descent, Hurston embraces the stereotype. Describing a scene in which she listens to a jazz ring with a white friend, she falls into an ecstatic trance marked by animalistic and tribal linguistic communication and writes that the orchestra "rears on its hind legs," "clawing" at the "tonal veil." She shakes her "assegai," a blazon of African spear. Afterward, her white friend meekly calls the performance "practiced music." While satirizing the idea that blackness Americans are in touch with such primitive spiritual forces, Hurston likewise makes even this stereotyped identity seem powerful and vital. Her primitive fugue reveals her feel to be much richer and more passionate than that of her companion, who is "so pale with whiteness."

Hurston'south essay uses the framing of her babyhood to illustrate that race is a concept rooted in social context, contingent on surround and cultural reinforcement. This frees her to reimagine race for her ain purposes, emphasizing her own subjectivity and self-worth past twisting the language of oppression into a linguistic communication of empowerment.

Race and Deviation ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Race and Difference appears in each chapter of How it Feels to be Colored Me. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.

How often theme appears:

chapter length:

Race and Difference Quotes in How it Feels to be Colored Me

Beneath you lot will find the of import quotes in How it Feels to be Colored Me related to the theme of Race and Difference.

I am colored but I offering nothing in the manner of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the just Negro in the United States whose grandad on the female parent'south side was non an Indian chief.

Page Number and Commendation: 1

Explanation and Analysis:

I call back the very twenty-four hour period that I became colored. Upwards to my thirteenth twelvemonth I lived in the footling Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. Information technology is exclusively a colored town.

Page Number and Citation: i-2

Explanation and Analysis:

The front porch might seem a daring identify for the rest of the town, simply it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite identify was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born offset-nighter. Not only did I relish the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.

Page Number and Citation: three

Explanation and Analysis:

They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their pocket-sized silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, just they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora withal.

Page Number and Commendation: iv-5

Explanation and Analysis:

I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all only about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a niggling pigmentation more than of less. No, I exercise not weep at the world—I am also busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Page Number and Commendation: vi-7

Explanation and Assay:

It is a bully hazard and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for information technology. No one on earth ever had a greater hazard for celebrity. The earth to exist won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for whatever act of mine, I shall become twice every bit much praise or twice every bit much arraign. It is quite exciting to concur the heart of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to express mirth or to weep.

Page Number and Commendation: 8-9

Explanation and Analysis:

I do not always feel colored. Even now I ofttimes achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel near colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Amid the thousand white persons, I am a dark stone surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me once more.

Page Number and Commendation: 9-10

Explanation and Assay:

Music. The slap-up blobs of purple and cerise emotion have not touched him. He has simply heard what I felt. He is far away and I encounter him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Page Number and Citation: xiii

Explanation and Assay:

Pour out the contents, and at that place is discovered a jumble of pocket-sized things priceless and worthless. A showtime-water diamond, an empty spool, $.25 of broken glass, lengths of cord, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, erstwhile shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail aptitude under the weight of things too heavy for any boom, a dried flower or 2 nonetheless a little fragrant. In your mitt is the dark-brown handbag.

Related Symbols: Bags

Page Number and Citation: 15

Explanation and Analysis: