How It Feels to Be Colored Me Essay Questions

Why might Hurston's views on slavery be considered controversial?

In "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston rejects the idea that her life has been negatively impacted by the legacy of slavery. Although she acknowledges that her own grandparents were slaves, she believes that the six decades that passed since slavery's abolition involved enough societal reconstruction for her to be able to thrive. In a sardonic, contemptuous tone, she seeks to set herself apart from "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." Rather than focusing on solidarity with all African Americans, Hurston prefers to see herself as one "the strong" who will excel in life. Ultimately, Hurston's emphasis on individual will and ability leads her to dismiss Black people who may not have had the same opportunities as her, and who understand their lives as being negatively affected by the racist structures and attitudes that, following slavery's example, created heightened policing of Black communities, statistically higher levels of poverty, and everyday discrimination among other injustices.

Explain the significance of the places in which Hurston sets her anecdotes.

Throughout the essay, Hurston sets her anecdotes in racialized public spaces. In doing so, she supports the theme of race as a social construct, showing how physical social spaces perpetuate ideas of racial difference. Hurston begins the essay by detailing how white Northern tourists would drive through Eatonville, the all-Black town in which she grew up. The divide between the road the white people drive on and the porches from which the Black locals watch presents a stark racial separation, with both contingents observing the other as a spectacle. Hurston, as a child, is unaware of the racial conflict that characterized turn-of-the-century American life. She breaks the racial divide by watching the tourists from her gatepost, getting close enough to interact with them. Hurston only begins to conceive of herself as "colored" when she moves to Jacksonville and lives among white people who view her as "a little colored girl." She later finds herself in another racially charged public space as a student at Barnard College. As one of the few Black people on the mostly white campus, Hurston is "a dark rock surged upon" in the white-water river. Hurston also shows how, in a majority-Black public space such as the New World Cabaret jazz bar, she can still feel her race as noticeable when her white friend doesn't respond to the music with the same feeling she does. By taking the reader through these social contexts, Hurston makes a subtle argument for how it is society's organization that fuels ideas of racial difference and not biological differences.

What is the meaning and significance of the "paper bag" analogy?

The paper bag analogy Hurston uses to close "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is a symbol for shared humanity. Hurston writes that most of the time she feels "like a brown paper bag of miscellany." She draws out the simile into an analogy by detailing an image in which there are several other paper bags set against a wall. The bags are colored red, white, and yellow, to represent other skin colors. Hurston suggests that, if the contents of each bag were dumped out, mixed up, and put back, the resulting bags would not have their contents altered too much. With this analogy, Hurston implies that the contents of one human soul are not dissimilar to any other. She ends the analogy by suggesting that perhaps God—"the Great Stuffer of Bags"—originally distributed souls in the same randomized manner. The analogy is significant because it encapsulates Hurston's view that race is socially constructed and that differences in skin pigmentation say nothing about differences in people's inner lives.