Racial Identity as Blessing or Curse: Hurston and Rodriguez

Introduction: The Dual Nature of Racial Identity

Today, in the United States, cultural, ethnic, and racial sensitivity are all approached from the perspective of inclusiveness and equality. In that sort of social climate, the notion of racial identity carries more positive connotations than negative ones, as everyone is encouraged to celebrate his or her heritage and to respect and value the heritage of others. In that respect, racial identity is a positive thing that allows all of us to maintain a psychological, familial connection to our ancestors and to our heritage in a way that adds value to our lives. However, racial identity is only beneficial when it is something of our own choosing and when we live in a society that values all people equally. It is quite another thing entirely when racial identity is foisted upon us — as members of a racial or ethnic minority — by members of the racial or ethnic majority, and when the only context of that identity is one of oppression, discrimination, and being defined by others as second-class citizens without equal rights.

Both Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Rodriguez provide views of racial identity in entirely different contexts, in which racial identity — especially in the case of Hurston — is associated with negative connotations. In her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston provides a heart-rending account of what racial identity meant in the negative sense during the lives of the first few generations of African Americans living in post-slavery America. Writing almost eighty years later in his "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood" (2007), Richard Rodriguez recounts a different type of negative experience in relation to racial and ethnic identity — one that deals with more subtle, yet still negative and sensitive, aspects of living within a society where one's family belongs to a minority race and culture of origin.

Hurston and the Imposed Racial Identity

More specifically, Hurston remembers what she referred to as "the very day that I became colored" — at the age of thirteen — revealing that she had never previously thought about her racial identity or considered herself to be different from other little girls. She describes herself as having been just "a Zora" until she arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, where she discovered that Zora was "no more." Instead, she found that she was "now a little colored girl," an identity thrust upon her by others — namely, white people — without any opportunity for her to establish what we might consider today to be a racial identity in the positive sense. She writes that she "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." This is an obvious reference to the realization by a young girl that she would now always be perceived and defined by others as a Negro, and that nothing she could do or achieve could change the fundamental way society defined her.

Hurston writes disdainfully about the fact that other African Americans of the time typically responded to the negative assumptions about their race by doing whatever they could to deny it. Specifically, she writes that she is "the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief" — an obvious sarcastic reference to the fact that many African Americans sought to escape the weight of their racial identity by fabricating a mixed racial heritage. Eighty years after Hurston's essay, contemporary African American comedian Chris Rock has a joke in his comedy routine referencing the same exact idea, in connection with how some men introduce their African American girlfriends by inventing a more "exotic" and presumably more "acceptable" ethnic identity. The difference is that in Chris Rock's era, the evolution of American society on racism takes enough of the sting out of the phenomenon to make it appropriate material for humor; in Hurston's era, that was hardly the case.

Later in her essay, Hurston admits that there are times when she wishes she could return to simply being a little girl — Zora — rather than a person whose identity is defined entirely by her skin color in the minds of others. She writes:

Hurston's Desire to Transcend Racial Definition

"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."

This passage is among the most powerful in the essay, capturing the tension between the identity others imposed on Hurston and the interior self she claimed for her own. It underscores the paper's central argument: that racial identity, when externally assigned rather than personally chosen, diminishes rather than enriches the individual.

Conclusion: When Racial Identity Helps or Harms

Obviously, Hurston and Rodriguez wrote in very different eras of American society. Whereas Hurston's racial identity was forced on her by those who desired to perpetuate prejudicial attitudes, the racial identity that Rodriguez describes in his family was a product of natural circumstances. In both cases, however, racial identity was a detriment rather than a beneficial aspect of life. While there is little question that racial identity can be a positive part of individuality in modern society, that only holds true when it reflects personal choice. It is not beneficial or positive when it is forced onto the individual in the manner described by Hurston, or when it develops out of a sense of inadequacy and shame, as described by Rodriguez.