In Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston explores the ironic distance created between herself and the world by racism. Her claim that “the game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting” summarizes one of her main points, that there is an inherent tragedy in operating from a point of racial superiority (Hurston). Her anecdote about her white friend’s inability to understand jazz in the same way as her ends with her claim that “the great blogs of purple and red emotion have not touched him,” alluding to an emotional colorlessness attached to his whiteness (Hurston). His displacement within the black jazz club is not just unfelt because of his race, but because of an inbred blindness that has never been challenged in him. He is not refusing the music or it’s meaning; he can only hear “good music” because he has been trained to hear it as that and that alone (Hurston). Hurston sees this as almost tragic, the inability to access a layer of emotion that she clearly appreciates a great deal.

The absence of race, or a simulation of such a thing, also factors into Hurston’s view of the inescapable reality of race. Her statement that in certain moments “I have no race, I am me” calls back to her childhood realization of her own race, the moment she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl” (Hurston). The presence of race as a complication is a given, but she is able to displace its effects from her mind because of her perspective. She remembers what it is like to be in a non-racialized mindset, or at least one not racialized by her herself. This allows her to break apart her status as a Black woman in society, pulling out the positives while mitigating the negatives as much as possible. Her analysis gives her the tools to fight back on some level against the conditions in which she must live.