Racism and Society -- Literary Comparison
Zora Neal Hurston's heartfelt essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) presents the experiences of a young girl as remembered by an adult black woman in the early 20th century. Her narrative is simultaneously disarming and sad, because the good cheer and humor seems to belie justified resentment toward white American society. She presents an image of cheerful acceptance of racial inequality and the persistent social exclusion and discrimination more than half a century since slavery was abolished. Her tone when relating heartbreaking memories is reminiscent of the "everything happens for a reason" mentality and it seems to be concealing repressed resentment.
There is a glimpse of the anger bubbling under the surface of cheerfulness...
My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something -- give pain, give death to what, I do not know." It suggests that while the narratives are brutally honest in terms of the human interactions they describe, the author's
perception of her truest emotions and reactions to racism in her time may be less accurate than her factual recall.
A more self-perceptive example from the same
genre is Just Walk on By, by Brent Staples (1986). The author obviously encountered many of the same types of social experiences as Hurston, and, like her, he used metaphorical humor very effectively to convey recollections of painful memories and realizations. The actual social dynamics that Staples describes as a professional journalist are not substantially different from those detailed from the perspective of a child and a…
