In the second paragraph of Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me”, she talks about the day that she became colored. Something that many people of the black community all go through at some point in their lives. The moment where they see that they are in some way different from others around them  When reading this paragraph I found myself truly relating to this as well as a black man who came to realize this around the same age as her. Thus when the readers get to the seventh paragraph they can find a similar response to this realization of Hurston being colored when she says, “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” Here she feels that no matter how much she desires not to, she is constantly reminded that she is colored and the importance of her past. Making Hurston, like many others feel like she has a new burden that she must carry, and that burden being the history of her people and the struggles they have all gone through.

In addition to her realization of her difference from others and how she is intended to carry the burden of her people, Hurston in the sixth paragraph of her text talks about “not being tragically colored.”  She goes further into this when she states in the same paragraph, “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it.” In this quote, Hurston goes on to discuss what she calls “the sobbing school of Negrohood”. Meaning the colored people of the past who had endured slavery and are still affected by it. When looking at this quote the reader can see that Hurston is separating herself from this “sobbing school” and it’s many issues, and how badly she wishes to be free from it. She wishes to drift apart from those that continue to stay saddened by what happened to the Colored people of the past. And rather than follow the same path as them Hurston would rather not “weep at the world” since she is too busy getting herself ready. Preparing herself for the bright future she plans to create. Where she can make a name for herself and not be tied down by the burdens of the tragedies of colored people and return to just being Zora.

After reading Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me”, one could say that her desire to continue to move forward with her life and the future that is to come, is something we could equate to how Americans are dealing with racial injustice today. Dwelling in the past will not make a difference in our present-day circumstances. Thus, rather than decide to lie in sorrow and sadness, people should continue to persevere past the pain. To find ways to bring about actual change and a way to pave our own futures for ourselves. Much like Hurston did.

Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928) shares a unique perspective on race through Hurston’s sentiments on living as an Black woman in a time after emancipation. She begins by recalling her childhood interactions with white passerby’s. Seeing as she lived in a colored town, she did not see many white people, but every time she did, she reveled in looking at them and being looked at. She remembers calling out and welcoming them to Florida, getting silver pieces from them in exchange for dancing and singing. After moving to another town in Florida for school, she acknowledges that she is seen as a colored girl. However, this realization does not make her feel any sort of way about herself or her life. She claims that she is different from the “sobbing school of Negrohood” because unlike them, who are busy lamenting on how nature has forsaken them, she sharpens her “oyster knife” in anticipation and preparation for life. The spiel that follows shares Hurston’s perspective on slavery’s impact on Hurston’s daily living as a Black woman. Hurston states that slavery is a thing of the past, sixty years to be exact, and since it is done and gone, she can live in the present as someone with opportunities for glory and recognition.

From reading this piece, one can conclude that Hurston is mostly unbothered by her skin color. Hurston’s way of living is simplified because she doesn’t connect her skin color to herself, she knows what she is and doesn’t see the need to prove anyone anything. Whatever comes to her will, and she is ready to make her own life regardless of her skin color and the difficulties that come with it. Du Bois is starkly different, he stresses over identity, being perceived, his conflicting American self and African self, authenticity, external validation and more. However, they are similar in that they both are ambitious, they have want to accomplish great deeds, and wont let their skin color get in the way, hence Hurston sharpening her oyster knife to make way and enjoy what she’s aiming for. In addition to not being bothered by acts of discrimination, she has adapted a kind of mentality called Cosmic Zora into her life. Cosmic Zora doesn’t hold Zora down to one race or time, and she is depicted as an eternal feminine. When Zora is in the vicinity of elegant and rich Peggy Hopkins Joyce, she activates Cosmic Zora and becomes a being unattached to a physical being, a kind of higher consciousness that connects Zora to the “Great Soul.”

Upon reading about Cosmic Zora, I went back to Emerson’s Nature text and saw that their lifestyles are similar. Hurston is more similar to Emerson than Du Bois is and this is possible because of both of their disconnections with society. Hurston and Emerson both want to look to the future, whether for ideas or experiences. Emerson says traditional and old ideas shouldn’t be the norm, and Hurston does’t want to be held back by her past and family history; they both value what the present has to offer. Emerson believes nature is the way to real enlightenment, and he is able to experience this due to his abandoning society and delving into nature. Hurston is able to separate herself from her experiences too; an act of discrimination is not targeting her, it is targeting her skin, and because she doesn’t think her skin defines her, she doesn’t feel any hatred. She knows she has more to offer, hence the paper bag ending. The paper bag example is to say that despite what we look on the outside, boring or ordinary, all sorts of colors, we all store both valuable and useless items: diamonds, dried flowers, and the like. This is Hurston’s way of saying what’s on the inside is more significant than anything the exterior could have to offer the world.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” is critical in the understanding of racism that black people experienced during his time period. He explains the emotions and aspirations black people felt both before and after the Emancipation, and delves into what systematically put his people into the same cycle of wanting freedom – even when it appears to the average White man as something that black people have already attained. However, to a reader in the present day, it may seem as if the tribulations Du Bois explains in depth may simply be problems in the past. After all, how could they not be when we have progressed so far as a country where it is now unacceptable to outwardly discriminate against black people? This belief is merely a fallacy – black people must still continue to seek freedom in the exact respects that Du Bois mentions in his literature more than a century later.

There are many people who think that outward racism ended when the Emancipation Proclamation was drafted, and Du Bois touches upon this mindset that many black people during his time period also shared. He states, “to him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.” This shows the ignorance (that stemmed not from lack of knowledge, per se, but rather, from pure hope) that black people around the time of Emancipation had in respect to where they thought racism came from. They held the belief that it was the mere act of enslaving black people that caused the prejudice against them, and that the one definite way to get rid of this prejudice was to simply ban slavery. Once this happens, America should truly be the land of the free, right?

However, Du Bois explains that this attitude was all too optimistic and goes in depth about the true sources of intolerance. It comes from the paradox of the black man getting a taste of education to a certain degree. Once the black man feels a sense of self-realization, he starts to compare his own poverty to his rich White neighbors. He starts to compare his (forced) lack of education to the common knowledge of business, life, and humanities that is only attainable to his White neighbors. And yet, even with this realization, black people are unable to move forward because the clearly Emancipation did not solve anything beyond the literal breaking of the black man’s shackles. He is still plagued by the racist attitudes of his White counterparts who will not allow black people to move further up in society.

While black people are allowed basic rights now, such as the right to vote and the right to get an education, it is imperative to realize that what Du Bois describes in his writing still applies today. Racism still exists in the forms of redlining neighborhoods, providing insufficient funds to these neighborhoods that leads to the lack of education, and over policing. As Du Bois states, “work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each.” The laws we have put in place simply do not allow for this cohesion that will ultimately lead to true freedom – it is what forces black people to continue to seek more freedom to this day.

“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”