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: 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. She undercuts the idea that her race should be a source of shame and pointedly shows that she embraces it fully. Furthermore, rather than shying away from the persistent stereotype that people of African descent are somehow more “primitive” than people of European descent, Hurston embraces the stereotype. Describing a scene in which she listens to a jazz band with a white friend, she falls into an ecstatic trance marked by animalistic and tribal language and writes that the orchestra “rears on its hind legs,” “clawing” at the “tonal veil.” She shakes her “assegai,” a type of African spear. Afterward, her white friend meekly calls the performance “good music.”