Hurston published “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” at the height of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance, a flowering of African-American culture during the 1920s that brought national attention to black artists, writers, and musicians. Hurston’s essay engages with one of the central questions of the age: what does it mean to be African-American in America? Hurston uses her autobiography, metaphor, and contrast to counter prevailing narratives of African-American identity.

Hurston uses her autobiography as a touchstone for articulating her experience of racial identity. The initial sentence of the essay previews her approach to the task of racial definition. She opens the essay with a joke. The joke hinges on the reader’s familiarity with the spurious claims to Native American heritage by African-Americans. These claims emerge from a sense of shame because African-American heritage is one rooted in slavery, while Native American heritage is seen as one that connects to a popular image of Native Americans as noble and worthy of celebration.

By refusing this claim, Hurston is signaling that she will take a light-hearted approach to the issue of racial identity. That light touch contrasts sharply with the sometimes-serious

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