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: In detailing a personal journey towards and then away from a racialized conception of her own identity, Hurston opposes the conventional wisdom of the time that race is an inherent characteristic that determines the personality, ability, and destiny of the individual. With time, she also gains the confidence to think of her race, which has so often been used as a weapon against African-Americans, as an asset. Hurston becomes aware of her own status as “colored” through recognizing her difference from white people. The moments when Hurston says she can most keenly “feel [her] race” occur when she moves from a black to a white community, or when a member of a white community visits her own. This suggests that race is a social phenomenon—that is, something that originates in one’s relationships to others rather than something that is essential to a person or group of people. Until the age of 13, Hurston doesn’t consider herself “colored” because no one has given her cause to think of herself in those terms. For Hurston, “white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.” Thus, young Hurston conceived of race as more of a socioeconomic distinction, a matter of differing circumstances, than an essential difference between people. Nevertheless, race as a category begins to feel real when Hurston moves to Jacksonville, where there are more white people: “ I was now a little colored girl.