How It Feels To Be Colored Me

An Analysis of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” Hurston’s audience is not explicitly specified but she seems to be talking to society in general. She arranges her essay in a way where the true purpose of her argument is not stated to the reader until she’s almost done with what she has to say. Her main argument is that skin color is just skin color and that on the inside, people are all the same. She alludes to it throughout her speech and gives many examples that serve to support what she will say eventually. She begins her essay with a fairly light-hearted tone and gives an example to the “very day” she became “colored” (Hurston). The way she phrases her sentences subtly implies and introduces the beginnings of her argument. She states that before her awakening she lived in a town where everyone looked like her and so she had no reason to believe she was different. She did not even believe herself to be different from the white people who passed through her town because she was not treated differently or negatively by them. Instead, she was praised. She establishes the fact that although she might have been born with dark skin that did not make her “colored” (Hurston). …show more content…
The placement of her anecdotes help her show the difference between how she was a child and how she was once she realized her “coloredness” (Hurston). As a child she was sheltered from the views of society by living in her town, but once she gains maturity a lot of thing are brought before her eyes. After the events of her mother dying and being shipped off to boarding school Hurston loses the cover the her segregated small hometown and is thrust into a world of