Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, authors during the Harlem Renaissance, used their poetry and short stories to challenge ideas about race and the division it caused in America. The narrators in Hughes’ “Theme for English B” and Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” are both in the process of exploring their racial identities, yet while the narrator in Hurston’s story embraces her differences, the speaker in Hughes’ poem is more focused on questioning the aspects that cause him and his white classmates to differ. Nonetheless, Hughes and Hurston both use a common theme of racial identity as well as symbolism and the use of metaphor, to explain the struggle of being African-American in the 20th century. In Hughes’ poem “Theme for
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In the beginning of the story, she remembers “the very day that I became colored,” a term imposed on her by society. Until she turned thirteen, she had lived in a predominantly black community in Eatonville, Florida, when she was known as “everybody’s Zora.” (539) She remembers how the community reacted to seeing white people ride through, being “peered at cautiously from behind the curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past.” (539) Hurston, however, quite enjoyed when strangers would pass through and would sit on top of a gate post to talk to them. She did not quite grasp the difference between herself and white people except that “they rode through the town and never lived there” (539) As racism was not a large part of her community and because of her upbringing, she did not fully realize the negative impact it had on her fellow African-Americans. It was only until her move to Jacksonville, where she was put into a school with white children, that she understood this. She states that she is “not tragically colored,” the constant judgement holding no effect over her unlike so many others. The continual reminder that she is “the granddaughter of slaves” looms over her, but it doesn’t upset her, instead she feels that slavery is quite literally a thing of the past, and what matters …show more content…
Throughout Hughes’ poem is the symbol of black and white. These two colors both represent the color of skin of the speaker and of his classmates, as well as the color of the page he is writing on. In the beginning of the poem, colored is just a word, however, taken in context, it has a very negative connotation because of how it was used to describe people of African-American descent. When the speaker talks about the color of the page, he 's questions whether his paper will be different because it is written by a person of color. Even though the paper is white, when he writes on it with ink, there will be black on it as well. The metaphor of the white page along with the black ink symbolizes his version of America: they are a part of each other. Hurston uses a metaphor about plastic bags to symbolize how everyone is more or less the same. She claims that she feels “like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall…in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.” (541) All of the bags are filled with items of both importance and unimportance and when the contents are dumped out, everyone is more or less the same: an empty bag, regardless of the color. This is her way of stating that we are all the same on the inside, and that outside appearances should not determine who we truly are, on the inside. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston both use their literature to bring
In the beginning of the story, she remembers “the very day that I became colored,” a term imposed on her by society. Until she turned thirteen, she had lived in a predominantly black community in Eatonville, Florida, when she was known as “everybody’s Zora.” (539) She remembers how the community reacted to seeing white people ride through, being “peered at cautiously from behind the curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past.” (539) Hurston, however, quite enjoyed when strangers would pass through and would sit on top of a gate post to talk to them. She did not quite grasp the difference between herself and white people except that “they rode through the town and never lived there” (539) As racism was not a large part of her community and because of her upbringing, she did not fully realize the negative impact it had on her fellow African-Americans. It was only until her move to Jacksonville, where she was put into a school with white children, that she understood this. She states that she is “not tragically colored,” the constant judgement holding no effect over her unlike so many others. The continual reminder that she is “the granddaughter of slaves” looms over her, but it doesn’t upset her, instead she feels that slavery is quite literally a thing of the past, and what matters …show more content…
Throughout Hughes’ poem is the symbol of black and white. These two colors both represent the color of skin of the speaker and of his classmates, as well as the color of the page he is writing on. In the beginning of the poem, colored is just a word, however, taken in context, it has a very negative connotation because of how it was used to describe people of African-American descent. When the speaker talks about the color of the page, he 's questions whether his paper will be different because it is written by a person of color. Even though the paper is white, when he writes on it with ink, there will be black on it as well. The metaphor of the white page along with the black ink symbolizes his version of America: they are a part of each other. Hurston uses a metaphor about plastic bags to symbolize how everyone is more or less the same. She claims that she feels “like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall…in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.” (541) All of the bags are filled with items of both importance and unimportance and when the contents are dumped out, everyone is more or less the same: an empty bag, regardless of the color. This is her way of stating that we are all the same on the inside, and that outside appearances should not determine who we truly are, on the inside. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston both use their literature to bring