Race, Identity, and Societal Labeling in 20th-Century Literature

Introduction: Literature and Racial Identity

Two pieces of 20th-century literature exemplify the alienation felt by African Americans in the United States. One of those works, authored by Zora Neale Hurston in 1928, is the essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me, which vividly illustrates the degree to which the identity of a Black person in the pre-Civil Rights era was defined by white society. More importantly, Hurston's work also illustrates how much internal conflict and perpetual struggle African Americans experienced when they tried to maintain their own self-identity. Whereas many Black Americans of that era accepted the expectations imposed on them by white society, others resisted this artificial identity. Hurston was clearly shaped by this dynamic and bitterly resisted the self-identity she was expected to reflect in order to get along in her society.

One of the mechanisms that Black people used to cope with racial stereotypes was, apparently, to downplay their ties to their African American heritage. Hurston makes a reference to this when she writes that she could "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" — meaning that it was commonplace for Black people to present themselves as part Native American in order to escape some of the racism directed against Black Americans.

Hurston and the Moment of Becoming 'Colored'

The author recalls the precise day that she "became colored," when she was first sent to school in Jacksonville. She writes that she "left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora," but when she "disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more; I was now a little colored girl." The author had not changed during the trip, yet the influence of external perceptions and characterizations imposed because of her skin color were so powerful that she writes, "I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown — warranted not to rub nor run." By that, Hurston means that she realized she was no longer perceived simply as a thirteen-year-old girl named Zora; she was now, above all else, a colored person. The reference to being "warranted not to rub nor run" signals that there was nothing she could do or say to overcome the overwhelming significance of her skin color as the defining characteristic through which others regarded her.

Later in the essay, Hurston writes: "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. 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. 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."

That passage suggests that the author is reminded at all times that she is, above all other possible definitions, a colored person. Some people invoke her heritage to discourage her ambitions; others invoke it to remind her of the anger she has every right to own. She resists both impulses, preferring to consider herself fortunate to have benefited from the progress achieved by her ancestors while refusing to allow her racial heritage to define who she is in her own mind or to limit her goals and aspirations.

Resisting the Weight of Racial Heritage

Ultimately, Hurston would live her life simultaneously resisting the low expectations placed on her by virtue of her race and the pull of justifiable anger toward mainstream white America. In another key passage, she writes that she is "not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." In other words, she refused to allow the injustice and inequity that characterized the lives of Black Americans of her era to destroy her optimism or her sense of purpose. She acknowledges that "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." This reflects her acceptance of the factual reality that her race dictates her role in the minds of others, while simultaneously expressing incredulity that this is, indeed, the case.

Still, the author reveals that one of her greatest comforts is forgetting that she is Black and that her race defines who she is to the outside world. In her mind, she is simply a person — an adult who was once a little girl named Zora. She clearly misses that earlier time in her life when she was completely unaware that her race defined her in others' eyes. She writes, "I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Later, she expresses the same idea: "At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads." It is her fantasy to be perceived for who she is, rather than for her skin color.

The other important literary work addressed here is "Just Walk on By," written in 1986 by Brent Staples. He describes his profound awareness that his skin color defines who he is in the minds of others and typically instills fear among white people who assume the worst about African Americans. Writing about a typical encounter with a white woman on the street, he says, "I was 23 years old, a graduate student newly arrived at [University]. It was in the echo of that terrified woman's footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I'd come into — the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse." His sarcastic reference to "the ability to alter public space in ugly ways" describes how the assumptions about him in the minds of others are so powerful that he can alter public space merely by his presence among strangers.