A Blacks Woman Struggle

In the essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, author Zora Neale Hurston writes to an American audience about having maturity and self-conscious identity while being an African American during the early 1900’s through the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance. Hurston expresses and informs her audience about how she does not see herself as a color, and instead sees herself as all she is made up of on the inside. Her primary claim is that she is not “tragically colored” and she should not have a single care about how the world reminds her of how she should act about her race. Her essay chronicles her personal experiences in being an unapologetically colored woman and creates the argument that she should not ever feel self-pity for being black. She utilizes her personal anecdotes and weaves them with metaphors, analogies, and rhetorical questions in order to create an immersive experience for the reader. Furthermore, Hurston engages the reader with her slightly sarcastic, strong, and blissfully positive tone effectively creates a way with words that communicate her claims in an entertaining way.

The memoir “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, was first published in 1928, and recounts the situation of racial discrimination and prejudice at the time in the United States. The author was born into an all-black community, but was later sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, where she experienced “race” for the first time. Hurston not only informs the reader how she managed to stay true to herself and her race, but also inspires the reader to abandon any form of racism in their life. Especially by including Humor, Imagery, and Metaphors, the author makes her message very clear: Everyone is equal.

Patricia Smith's "What its like to be a black girl is a breathtaking poem to read as it gives the real picture of what a black American girl who is faced by racial prejudice, inner struggles and slavery. This poem will be compared and contrasted with Nadine Gordimer's country lover which is also a heart-rending story about a young black skinned girl-Thebedi finding herself in love with a white skinned Afrikaner boy-Paula whose parents are the young girls' masters. She is also faced with slavery, prejudice, racism and pursuit for freedom (Brown, 2009). This paper will critically compare the two literary works in terms of content, style and form.

When comparing and contrasting the poem What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith with the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer. The poem and the short story are both great examples of the difficulty of life between different ethnic backgrounds. The Poem What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith is more recent than the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer they are written during different time frames and their stories are unique within their time frame.

In Zora Neale Hurtson's “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” we encounter a very broad descriptive essay where Hurston explores the new found discovery of her self-admiration. To complement the wide variety of description used throughout the essay, Hurston includes imagery and figurative language to capture the reader with a first class seat on a journey with her. At the beginning of the essay, Hurtson dives into her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, describing moments using anecdotes when she sang and danced throughout the streets and greeted the neighbors. Back then she was free from the scaring feeling of being different and was "everybody's Zora". But she immediately became different when she was thirteen and her mother passed away and she left home to attend boarding school in Jacksonville.

Zora Neale Hurston is unequivocally open about her race and identity in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As Hurston shares her life story, the reader is exposed to Hurston’s self-realization journey about how she “became colored.” Hurston utilizes her autobiographical short story as a vehicle to describe the “very day she became colored.” Race is particularly vital in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” as she deals with the social construct of race, racism, and sustaining one’s cultural identity.

Zora Neal Hurston, an accomplished African American writer, philanthropist, scholar, and woman’s rights activist born January 7th 1891 and died in 1960. Zora is one of the founding mothers of literature in the African American renaissance. Zora’s writing is one of the most vivid writings’ of its time, her literary descriptions help the reader understand her perspective while giving the reader a “set stage” to envision each scene in the story. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” dealt with a time period after slavery was abolished, but discrimination and segregation were still present in people’s minds. Through humor, anecdote and metaphor, Hurston addresses her personal experiences as a Negro in the 1900s.

“How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, a piece by Zora Neale Hurston, was written to allow readers to look through the eyes of a colored woman. Specifically, a colored woman living in early segregated America. Hurston described her experiences through emotion, credibility, reasoning, and appropriate timing. With these techniques, she clearly displayed pathos, ethos, logos, and kairos in her writing. Through these appeals, she successfully creates a strong case for her purpose in writing the essay. She intended to not only share her experiences, but to let readers perceive her emotions as well. Hence, the title stating how it “feels” to be her.

In her book, she writes short poems about issues she’s witnessed and been a part of throughout her life. Her constant experience with being humiliated in public, looked down upon, just because she’s considered different in society. All because she’s an African American woman. Just like the thousands of immigrants from Australia. They will be frowned upon because they’re outsiders of America, and do not belong.

The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset,

I. Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” was a writing that was one of the brightest representatives of the period, “The Harlem Renaissance”. Zora Neale Hurston supported the same rebuff against white culture as her male counterparts, however, made it in her own manner - to focus on the problems of the ordinary level (in other words, she described the everyday experience of African American people). Her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” describes the life of a girl who was living in a small town called Eatonville and was forced to move into a boarding school in Jacksonville. Since that time she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, was now a little colored girl” (Hurston 153).

America, the land of freedom, is a country renowned for its personal. The founders of this country built our governing principles on the ideology of personal rights and liberties. Even though the country was built on those ideas, not everyone has been able to enjoy them. Throughout history there have almost always been second grade citizens and disposable peoples, the same is true for America. Historically, there have been several groups of people living with substandard citizen ship, two being African Americans and people with disabilities.

Greeting, I did learn many things while reading chapter 2. However, the most interesting thing I found was the concept that expressing about race and gender oppression simultaneously. On page 51, based on the 1996 welfare reforms "welfare queen" deserve state assistance due to race and gender idea. However, the word "welfare queen" stereotypical represent black woman. Does any one knows white receives more state assistance than non-white. Indeed, based on U.S Department of Agriculture data white are more state assistance recipients than non-white.

The short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, by Joyce Oates, (1966), and the poem, “What it’s Like to Be a Black Girl”, by Patricia Smith, (1991), are both about the coming of age of young girls and the conflicts that they encounter. The two pieces explore issues that most young girls have with their bodies and others during their puberty years. The literary elements that will be compared in this essay is imagery and symbolism. The main conflict in both pieces that will be explored is individual versus self. These literary elements and conflict will help us to explore the issues that these two individual young girls