How It Feels to Be Colored Me Essay

This was a short story written by a colored lady in 1928. Zora says she never knew there was a difference until she was in her early teens. If anything before, all she had seen was white people passing through her place but did not remain there. While she is a child, to her, there are no differences between black and white people. It is only when his circumstances change that she begins to understand that there are differences, enormous ones. This happens when she is sent to a larger town, Jackson, to attend boarding school.
Zora shows her signature acceptance of the fact she is black and proud of it. Writing this in 1928, when racism was rife, and people were shot and burned for just having a dark skin, she showed determination and courage to be educated as much as she was. However, this was not her only achievement. Zora also differentiated herself from many of what she saw as self-pitying black people in her peers and rose above this view, showing that a colored woman, as they were referred to in those days, indeed could achieve their dreams.
Although she made her point with her writings. Zora was always proud of her heritage and thought it made a person what they were. She spent much time collecting actual stories from other writers about their lives as black writers and was very prominent in civil liberties. This particular piece of her work is one of her short stories, where she looks back at her life without real prejudice, but with almost acceptance.
Colored Me is a very engaging essay, which depicts how the Harlem Renaissance went on in the US. The African American writer has presented the racial identity with clarity by describing her off and on the relationship with her race and the innate desire to be able to share her feelings and express her opinion as an individual. Instead of denying the race, the author has beautifully and very simply described the difference between a “poet” and a “negro poet”. Even though, racial identity is important, it does not mean that it should be the single most defining characteristic of a person because this makes it very reductive. Deeply engaged with the discourse of the Harlem Renaissance on race in the U.S. and on the African-American artist’s representation of racial identity. To this day, racial discrimination remains a contentious issue for many people in America.
The essay takes a controversial turn on the issue of slavery and takes a very artistic approach while representing race and identity. The writer is not depressed by the aspect of slavery and deems it as a thing of the past. She also states that the white people are in a more difficult situation because the game of chasing something is more exciting than the game of keeping it safe. Hurston just wants to keep herself separate from the history of slavery and oppression. She uses the tragic narrative in an elegantly light and artistic style.