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African Americans have been shunned throughout the history of the New World. Zora Neale Hurston has had personal experience; she spent her life in a highly populated colored community. But in her short story, “How it Feels to be Colored Me” she, the narrator, focuses on directing the opposite in her book. In real life, she was raised in an African American community, while she placed herself in the book as a person surrounded by first the African Americans and then for most of her life only Caucasians. Zora Neale Hurston has experienced the differences of two colored worlds. When Hurston was thirteen, her mother died and her father soon remarried. Her stepmother and she did not get along and complications between them eventually ended up in a physical struggle. At fourteen, she left home and faced the real world on her own. She did not give many details of how she survived in the world alone, but she did state three things that permanently with her though that time: an immensely engaging personality, a determination to write and her hunger to be recognized was as zealous as it was unmanageable. According to Zora, living in the black society was comfortable, but once she opened the doors to the white community, she started to experience some complications. Though it was not as bad as she predicted it to be, it was extremely different. In “How It Feels to be Colored Me”, she grew up in a predominately white society, but was treated equal; however, there have been countless times in American history where African Americans were never given that opportunity. Stepping foot in the New World, African Americans were never given the opportunity to be equal or free to the white man.
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