Arton Popaj
10/21/18
English 102 & 96
Professor Salzman
To Laugh or To Clash
Zora Neale Hurston’s, How it Feels to be Colored Me is memoir where in it she discovers her identity and pride. Along her essay Hurston uses imagery and personal experience to take us on the journey with her. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” said by Dr. Martin Luther King is a quote that Zora in How it Feels to be Colored Me grasps and uses this method to counter prejudice acts during the early 20th century.
Zora was raised in an all-black community in Florida. Being raised in an all-black community, she was not exposed to the diversity of skin colors. In Florida she was “everybody’s Zora,” but it was not until she had gone to boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida where she was not “Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl.” Zora recounts that at college in Barnard, that she was “a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea.”, she also remembers how when going to a jazz club with her white friend, she was deeply affected by the music, while her white friend was not, Zora values these different memories because she uses them to examine racial differences. In relation I attend a predominantly Black Hispanic university where at New Jersey City University we acknowledge different skin colors but also who we are as a whole. Ethnicity and Identity are commonly misunderstood. Ethnicity is state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition that we are born into. What we do within ourselves after being born into an ethnic group is known as self-identity. The misunderstanding between ethnicity and identity is what usually results into racial bias. White supremacists fail to comprehend that although someone is born into a different ethnicity as theirs, what builds their character is their moral choices and hard working manner, not their skin color.
During this period people of color were commonly discriminated against. Zora’s attitude towards the discrimination is too accept and embrace her color and culture. In the 3rd paragraph Zora jokingly speaks out to the white people who are riding their dusty horses through town saying “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin?” Zora believes behaving in this satirical manner is a way of opposing racial hatred. An article I agree with called “...
