How It Feels To Be Colored Me

Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” can best be understood in its historical and cultural context, namely the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance.Americans of the twentieth century had lived through an unprecedented world war. In revolt against the perceived waste of human lives and the bankrupt morality that allowed death on such a massive scale during World War I, many Americans, especially younger Americans, eagerly embraced the modern world left in the aftermath of the war. Because of developments in transportation, communication, and manufacturing, this world was one that moved at a faster pace than that of the generation before.This new culture valued what was new and what was modern, not tradition and the past.

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of a confluence of trends in this more modern culture. Some modernists were fascinated with what they perceived as primitive cultures, which they saw as an antidote to the hypocrisy of tradition.Primitivism celebrated primitive culture, arts, and music as more authentic and more in touch with the deep instincts and human drives highlighted by psychologist Sigmund Freud. African-Americans, the most accessible “primitive” culture to white Americans, became a central focus of white interests.

African-Americans, shaped by many of the same forces as their white peers, took this opening to make a place for an art and culture of their own, one worthy of celebration and one capable (they hoped) of showing nonblacks that African-Americanswere capable of producing art that justified a place at the American table. The “New Negro,” celebrated in Alain Locke’s 1925 essay, “Enter the New Negro,” was the embodiment of this drive for modernity and self-definition among African-Americans, especially those who left their homes to live in cities like New York (and especially its black enclave, Harlem).

Hurston’s essay is grounded in the notion of the New Negro. Her refusal to look to the recent African-American past reflects the Harlem-Renaissance-era fascination with newness and the future. Her inclusion of the jazz scene from the felicitously named New World Cabaret emphasizes both the association of African-American culture with the primitive and the celebration of a supposedly more authentic way of being. Hurston’s sense of pride in her people’s survival of slavery, her insistence that whites have nothing over blacks, and her full-throated embrace of American identity reflect the desire to write African-Americans into the American story.

Finally, Hurston’s portrayal of racial identity reflects a generational divide among African-American intellectuals of the day that broke into open battle during the Harlem Renaissance. While older writers like W.E.B. DuBois focused on recuperating the African-American past (DuBois famously talked about the “sorrow songs”—African American spirituals—as a major African-American contribution to American culture and the tragedy of racism), Hurston and younger writers like Langston Hughes were more interested in creating art that embraced modernity.