Title: Race and Difference Theme in How it Feels to be Colored Me | LitCharts
Headings: Race and Difference
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Race and Difference Quotes in How it Feels to be Colored Me

Content: A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass.” Hurston’s point is that the exterior of a bag doesn’t affect what it contains, and in this way she uses the metaphor to combat popular conceptions of race as something that determines one’s intelligence, talent, or identity. Later in her life, Hurston also learns to lean into her African-American identity, even when this identity is maligned or mocked by both black and white acquaintances. As a child, the forced awareness of herself as “colored,” a little girl “warranted not to rub or run,” makes her visible as a target of racial discrimination and control. As an adult, she begins to view this racial visibility as a distinction. That Hurston feels she can control not only whether to identify as African-American but whether that identity is positive or negative, in defiance of wider culture, illustrates the importance of perspective rather than biology when thinking through race. She opens her essay by invoking a stereotype about African-Americans: “ I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.” In a tongue-in-cheek way, she’s pointing to what she sees as a tendency on the part of African-Americans to minimize or dilute their blackness by inventing a different ancestry for themselves, thereby claiming a different cultural and ethnic heritage. To “extenuate” something is to make it seem less offensive—more forgivable—but Hurston argues that African descent needs no such apology.