Zora Neale Hurston

Racial Identity Formation and Confrontations With Difference

In her essay, Hurston makes an early argument for the concept of racial difference as socially constructed rather than biologically essential. She begins by describing her childhood in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where she never truly saw herself as "colored" because no one in her community had given her a reason to think of herself through a racialized lens. At this time, “white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there,” suggesting that at this point in her life, Hurston perceived race as more of a socioeconomic distinction, rather than a biological one. It was only when she moved to Jacksonville at age thirteen that she was made aware of her "colored" status, now recognizing her difference from white people she was now in community with. She would have a similar experience moving to New York and attending Barnard as its first self-identified African-American student. In recounting these experiences, Hurston articulates a process wherein she goes from not identifying with any particular racial category at all, to identifying herself in part through her race. In this way, Hurston highlights how race, though socially constructed, still maintains very real implications that can influence how she is perceived and how she perceives herself.  Still, she rejects the bioessentialist notions that race predetermines an individual's behavior, personality, or path in life.

Self-Determination and Empowerment

Once Hurston is made to truly "feel [her] race" and becomes pointedly aware of her "colored" status, she eventually chooses to perceive her racial hypervisibility as a positive asset. She feels no shame in her African ancestry, and embraces having been the descendant of people who were enslaved. In emphasizing that race and perceptions of it are both personally and socially informed, and thus not as rigid as they made seem, Zora employs her own subjectivity and define herself on her own terms, taking the language historically used to oppress her and bending it to serve her needs. Unwilling to wait until societal norms swing in her favor, Zora takes up the task of empowering herself to act and create as a scholar and artist, unburdened by the depraved history of racial hatred and violence that she believes haunts the subconscious of her white peers.

Individuality

Hurston's essay is fundamentally rooted in her own lived experience, down to the "Colored Me" in the title. She does not claim to speak for all Black people in describing her process coming to understand her own racial identity, and frequently suggests that her choice to reject any shame surrounding her "colored" status diverts from what members of her race are societally expected to do under the conditions of the Jim Crow era. In recounting her myriad experiences from childhood into adolescence and adulthood, all of which depict an ever-shifting understanding of self in relation to her surrounding community, Hurston articulates racial identity as inherently multifaceted, and shaped by one's own unique lived experiences. Hurston's valuing of the individual's lived experience is an overarching theme that is featured in much of her literary and anthropological work. 

Author: Destinee Thom, MA, MSLIS, 2025