Title: How It Feels to Be Colored Me Themes | GradeSaver
Headings: How It Feels to Be Colored Me Themes
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
by Zora Neale Hurston
How It Feels to Be Colored Me Themes
Race as a Social Construct
Performance
Racialized Public Spaces
Rejection of Victimhood

Content: How It Feels to Be Colored Me Themes | GradeSaver
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How It Feels to Be Colored Me
by Zora Neale Hurston
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About How It Feels to Be Colored Me How It Feels to Be Colored Me Summary Character List Glossary Themes Quotes and Analysis Paragraphs 1 – 4 Paragraphs 5 – 7 Paragraphs 8 – 17 Symbols, Allegory and Motifs Metaphors and Similes Irony Imagery About Zora Neale Hurston's Controversial Place in The Harlem Renaissance Literary Elements Essay Questions Quiz 1 Quiz 2 Citations
How It Feels to Be Colored Me Themes
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Race as a Social Construct
One of the most prevalent themes in " How It Feels to Be Colored Me " is that race is a social construct—i.e. a human-invented and perpetuated classification system not based in essential biological differences. For hundreds of years, white settlers in the United States tried to justify genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African-descended people by arguing that biological differences meant non-white people were of a lower order of the human species, seeking to designate them as separate and inferior "races." The flawed and biased theory of biological racial difference has long been refuted by biologists, but we still live with the legacy of white supremacist hierarchical categorization. Hurston contributes to the idea of race being socially constructed by stating that she "became colored," only thinking of herself as "a little colored girl" when she was thirteen and lived among white people who projected their prejudices onto her. Rather than feeling her race as something essential encoded into her biology, Hurston notices her race in contexts where, for social reasons, her skin color sets her apart. Performance
Performance is another of the essay's major themes. The theme first appears when Hurston details how her childhood involved sitting on her gatepost to watch "the show" of white tourists passing through her all-Black town. While she sees herself as a spectator of the exotic white tourists, she also becomes the entertainer, singing and dancing for them. The white tourists give her dimes, believing she must be performing for money, but in truth she is just being herself, happy to express the joy that so often prompts locals to "deplore" her.