Zora Neale Hurston

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“How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston is an abridged story of her childhood growing up in a racially divided country. The emphasis of this story is not on her actual childhood, but her personal growth over the years regarding her racial identity and personal views of the racial divide. She tells her story starting in Florida, first Orlando then Jacksonville, and eventually Harlem in New York City, NY. She starts of her story speaking off how she is just an ordinary person yet is extremely unique. Near Orlando, Hurston lives in a majority colored town where she only sees white people as they pass through on their way to Orlando. It was during this time in Hurston’s life that she becomes colored. She first becomes colored …show more content…
She notices she is one of the only colored girls as well as how little in common she has with her white friend. Hurston befriends a white neighbor and hangs out with him at a Jazz club where she realizes how they are different. At this jazz club, they listen to performances while just Hurston sings and dances along. However, she views this not as differences in race, but as differences in personality. A subconscious divide between the two is created when Hurston suddenly realizes how far away from each other their cultures and personalities are. Also, Hurston reveals one of her feminine role models to be a white actress named Peggy Hopkins Joyce (Hurston). Even though she is white, Hurston looks up to her as a role model because of her femininity, not race. She is indifferent between being an American and a colored American. To her, she is just an American. Hurston doesn’t take discrimination badly. Instead, she is surprised that people wouldn’t enjoy her awesome personality. At the end of the day, the world is extremely diverse with everyone being different in some way, shape, or form where skin color shouldn’t matter. Furthermore, Hurston’s purpose is to convince us that the color of skin shouldn’t matter and that everyone should embrace each other for who they are. She argues, through the telling of her story, that she hadn’t always considered herself colored. Instead, she just viewed herself as
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