"Race Does Not Exist"

What really surprised me when reading the biography of Zora Neale Hurston was that she “quarreled especially with Langston Hughes; she rejected the idea that a black writer’s chief concern should be how blacks were being portrayed to the white reader.” The biography goes on to say that Hurston felt she didn’t have to uplift her race because it was already uplifted. I guess I was so surprised by this because the era in which Hurston was writing was one marked with so much racism. She withstood the oppression and stayed confident in who she was despite everything. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” shows Hurston’s attitude about her race. She says that she is constantly reminded that she is “the granddaughter of slaves” but this reminder “fails to register depression” within her. When I first read this sentence I couldn’t believe what she was saying. How could she not be angry about all of the years of oppression and inhuman treatment that her people went through? Is she just disregarding all of the horror that her ancestors bore? After reading on, I realized that she is not disregarding it, but has grown from it. She doesn’t see herself as someone bound by her race and is happy “to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.” Hurston uses the analogy of the start of a race to explain her view on her ancestors. “The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said, “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!”; and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.” She says that she has paid through all of her ancestors to get where she is today.

I didn’t understand Hurston’s joke that she uses to begin “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” so I looked up a commentary on it by Cheryl A. Wall of The Scholar and Feminist Online. Hurston’s joke says, “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.” Wall says, “The joke is aimed both at those whites who would assume that blackness is a problem requiring a solution, or at least an explanation, and at those blacks, almost certainly including race-conscious New Negroes, who want it understood that they are not merely black.” Hurston claims her race but realizes that it is not biologically, but socially defined. Dr. Reynolds (TIU professor) always says that “race doesn’t exist” because race cannot be found in DNA. We know that there are different pigments of skin but the real difference comes because of social barriers. Hurston acknowledges this when she says, “I remember the very day I became colored.” She speaks of her hometown, Eatonville, where everyone around her was black. She knew nothing of discrimination and the evils of racism until she left Eatonville to go to school and make a life for herself. She refers to this journey as Hegira – “the forced march of Muhammed from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. hence any forced flight or journey for safety.” Although she feels this journey has been forced, she “asserts that any incongruity between the “colored” and “me” of its title has been resolved” (Wall).

At the end of the essay, Hurston compares people to stuffed bags. She says that the bags may be different colors, but the stuffing “might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.” Simply put, the color of our skin or the color of the bags may be different, but what is inside is similar. “Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place – who knows?”