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How It Feels To Be Colored Me Essay

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Race, gender, sexual orientation, or social class should not determine one’s personal identity. Identity should only determine one’s character and beliefs. Often enough, though identity is determined by the former. The personal narrative “How it Feels to be a Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, show flaws in peoples’ judgments of identity. Whether or not it is human nature or blind ignorance that makes us prejudge people due to external features, preferences, or financial status judging people due to these qualities is erroneous. In the personal narrative essay “How it Feels to be a Colored Me” Hurston states, “Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida.” Hurston grew up in a town known to be predominantly African American in Eatonville, Florida. Most of Hurston’s life she was in a cultural bubble living in a place where citizens with the same or very similar beliefs and ethnicities so leaving her home town would create a “culture shock”. She lived there for the first thirteen years of her life so all she knew was Eatonville; she would not realize the reason for intolerance. Living in a place labeled as a Negro Town could possibly make one feel demeaned. People labeling it as such are judging the town and the people living there based on an external characteristic; they know nothing of …show more content…

There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.” Hurston is not sad because she is African American and she appears joyful. When Hurston says ‘I am not tragically colored’ she is saying she doesn’t view it as a bad thing it is just her situation she was dealt. Hurston, while dealt a bad hand (in that time period) continues to go on optimistically. Hurston was colored and identified as such people would sometimes prejudge her and she did not despair over it or use it as any form of excuse to not live her life which is

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