Why is race important in How it Feels to Be Colored Me?

Race is extremely important in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” because the essay deals with the social construct of race, racism, and maintaining one’s cultural identity.

She begins the essay with, “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's side was not an Indian chief.” Immediately, Hurston jokes about one of the ways she sees African Americans classify themselves, referring to the cultural joke that African Americans like to include being Indian as part of their cultural identity. Unlike most African Americans, Hurston suggests she is 100% black (colored), a fact she did not realize until she was thirteen.

She states, “I remember the very day that I became colored.” Hurston then begins a series of incidents that help to form her awareness as a black person. “Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando.” Huston explains that because she grew up in an all-black town, her race was never an issue. It was when she moved to the white town of Jacksonville that the concept of race, more particularity, her race became clear. “It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.” Her first encounters with racism after moving to Jacksonville made her aware of her race.

The essay recounts the various situations in which her race is more apparent to her because of the racism she experienced simply because of the color of her skin. She writes of her experience at Bernard College, “I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” She highlights again that it is others who are more concerned about her race, something she rarely thinks about. She writes, “The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.” Huston’s identity and confidence is less about her race and more about who she is a person.

Throughout the essay, Hurston exerts her identity as an American who just happens to be black. It is society, not her, that seeks to place her in a certain category (black). She ends the essay by illustrating that people are all the same. She states, “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless.” Because “How it Feels to Be a Colored Me,” deals with Huston’s cultural identity and the way society forces her to classify herself because of her skin color, race is an important element of the essay.