How It Feels to Be Colored Me Essay Examples

Zora Neale Hurston

Essay

1928

Writer argues that race isn't an essential feature that a person is born with, but instead emerges in specific social contexts.

Hurston describes a tendency for African-Americans to minimize or exoticize their racial identities to escape such discrimination or force others to treat them as individuals. The fact that claiming different ancestry is common and sometimes effective illustrates how vague and malleable racial identity can be.

We can see bags as a symbol of her own experience of and thinking about race. She refers to “brown” and “white, red and yellow” bags that represent skin color, but that's the end of her description of the bags themselves.