"How It Feels To Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston

Interesting reading published in The World Tomorrow: A Journal Looking Toward a Christian World in 1928.

Firs thing I've read from Zora Neale Hurston, an Alabamian born in 1891 that was moved to Florida at short age. She grew in Eatonville near Orlando before the era of Mickey Mouse and became part of the Harlem Renaissance or "New Negro Movement" - Eatonville was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States. 

The author style in the essay is simple and unapologetic. She refuses to play to be a victim of her race unjust past and present discrimination. She grows from the ashes and focus on her future, be it good or bad. 

Some excerpts from "How It Feels To Be Colored Me".

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.

Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

At certain times I have no race, I am me.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

(Read the essay here.) 

Reading other stuff about Zora Neale Hurston, called my attention a quote where she criticized race pride. 

Suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a [George Washington] Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.