'How It Feels to Be Colored Me' by Zora Neale Hurston



"How It Feels to Be Colored Like Me" by Zora Neale Hurston

PROMPT: In a well organized essay, explain how Hurston shares her attitudes about race in America in her essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me."

Questions to consider:

- What are her views on race? How do you know?

- What techniques does she use to share her views? How do the strategies (diction, syntax, figurative language, etc.) emphasize her views?

Challenge: Include Hurston’s response to other influential African-American writers’/speakers’ commentaries on race.

|It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . .|

|. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warrings ideals in |

|one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. |

|W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) |

|The Souls of Black Folk (1903) |

|As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he looks to white folks for |

|approval . . . then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about. |

|August Wilson, Jr. (1945-2005 ) |

|Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, act 1 (1984) |

|Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face. |

|Carol Moseley-Braun (1947-) |

|interview in The New Republic, November 15, 1993 |

Quotes selected from “African-American Quotations - From Muhammad Ali to Andrew Young” compiled by Ann Marie Imbornoni for Information Please® Database, © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc.

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