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“I am colored but I 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.”
With that opening line, Zora Neale Hurston announces herself. No apology. No plea for understanding. Just a joke—a sharp, knowing joke aimed at a familiar habit among African Americans of her era: claiming Native American ancestry to soften the stigma of Blackness. Hurston refuses the gesture. She arrives fully, unvarnished, and unashamed.
The year was 1928. The Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom. Black artists, writers, and musicians were redefining what it meant to be African American in a nation still gripped by segregation and violence. Many of Hurston's contemporaries focused on the tragedy of racism—the sorrow, the struggle, the long legacy of oppression. Hurston took a different path. Her essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," published in the magazine *The World Tomorrow*, offered something startling: a celebration.
Being "colored," Hurston insisted, was not a curse. It was not a burden to be borne with clenched teeth and tear-stained cheeks. It was, in her words, "a bully adventure." She was not "tragically colored." She had "no great sorrow dammed up in my soul." Instead, she was "too busy sharpening my oyster knife"—ready to pry open the world and claim what it had to offer.
This was not the voice of ignorance. Hurston knew racism intimately. She had felt its sting, been reduced to "a little colored girl" by the eyes of a segregated society. But she refused to let that reduction define her. The essay was her counter-statement: a declaration that racial identity could be a source of power, not just pain.
Hurston built her argument through autobiography, metaphor, and contrast. She told stories from her own life—of growing up in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black incorporated town in the United States; of the moment she first realized the world saw her differently; of jazz clubs in Harlem and walks down Seventh Avenue. Each scene served a purpose. Each metaphor—the oyster knife, the race, the bags of miscellany—carried a challenge to conventional thinking.
Her tone was subversive. Where other writers pleaded for acceptance, Hurston simply assumed it. Where others emphasized victimhood, she emphasized agency. Where others saw whiteness as privilege, she saw it as a disadvantage—a burden of maintaining what one already has, rather than the thrill of pursuing what one can gain.
The essay was also deeply personal. Hurston wrote not as a representative of her race, but as herself—Zora, with her particular history, her particular confidence, her particular wit. She refused to perform the role of the suffering Black subject for a white audience. She refused to be the "tragically colored" figure that so many expected.
At the heart of Hurston's vision was a radical proposition: that racial identity is not an essence, but a circumstance. It is real—undeniable, inescapable in a society that insists on its importance—but it is not the whole truth about a person. Hurston could feel "colored" in some moments and "cosmic" in others. She could be the descendant of slaves and the heir to civilization. She could be a "brown bag of miscellany" whose contents were, at bottom, no different from anyone else's.
The essay challenged both white readers who saw Blackness as inferiority and Black readers who saw Blackness as tragedy. Hurston offered a third way: a vision of identity rooted in self-possession, curiosity, and joy.
Why did Hurston choose humor to open such a serious exploration? What does it mean to laugh at the very thing that society uses to wound you? And how does a person raised in a world designed to diminish her emerge so fully, so unapologetically, herself?
About the Book
Zora Neale Hurston refuses the role of the 'tragically colored' in this bold 1928 essay. With wit and confidence, she redefines racial identity as a source of power, not pain—from the shock of first discrimination to the primal joy of jazz. A timeless manifesto of self-possession that flips the script on victimhood.
Key Takeaways
Identity is a circumstance, not an essence.
Hurston shows that racial identity is imposed from the outside—like a permanent dye—rather than discovered within. She can feel 'colored' in one moment and 'cosmic' in the next, proving that the self is deeper than any social label.
Joy is a form of resistance.
By refusing to perform the role of the 'tragically colored' victim, Hurston reclaims her own narrative. Her insistence on pleasure, curiosity, and 'bully adventure' in the face of racism is a radical act of self-possession.
The past is a starting line, not a finish line.
Hurston reframes slavery not as a curse but as a transaction that bought her entry into civilization. She runs forward, refusing to 'halt in the stretch to look behind and weep,' turning history into momentum rather than weight.
Privilege can be a cage; striving can be freedom.
In a stunning inversion, Hurston pities white people for being burdened by the need to protect what they have. She sees the 'game of keeping' as far less exciting than the 'game of getting,' which gives her an unencumbered, forward-facing ambition.
Some truths are felt, not explained.
In the Harlem cabaret, Hurston is transported by jazz into a primal, ancestral connection that her white friend cannot access. This moment reveals that race also lives in the body and in shared cultural inheritance—a reality that transcends intellectual analysis.
There is a self that exists before and beyond race.
Walking down Seventh Avenue with her hat angled, Hurston becomes 'the eternal feminine with its string of beads'—a cosmic self belonging to no race or time. This inner sanctuary proves that no external label can define the whole of a person.
Discrimination is a puzzle, not a wound.
When faced with prejudice, Hurston feels not anger but astonishment. 'How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?' she asks, revealing a self-worth so complete that rejection becomes baffling rather than diminishing.
Underneath all labels, we are the same miscellany.
Hurston's final image—brown, white, red, and yellow bags of miscellany propped against a wall—argues that race is only the outer wrapping. Inside, every person contains the same jumble of priceless and worthless human stuff, filled by 'the Great Stuffer of Bags.'
Who Should Listen?
Readers tired of narratives that reduce Black identity to suffering and seeking a defiant, joyful alternative.
Anyone who has ever felt defined by a label they didn't choose and needs a model for reclaiming their own story.
Students of American literature and the Harlem Renaissance who want to experience Hurston's radical voice firsthand.
Creative professionals or entrepreneurs who need a jolt of audacious confidence to pursue their ambitions without apology.
