How It Feels to Be Colored Me

In the essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Zora Hurston wrote an informal narrative about how she felt growing up while being an African American in the United States in the early 1900’s. As she grew up in a small, all African American town, Hurston rarely felt discriminated against until she had to change schools when she was thirteen. Even after officially acknowledging she was a different skin color than others in her school, Hurston continued to appreciate her lifestyle and dismiss the significance of racism. She was in disbelief that anyone would dislike her and even said in her essay, “how can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” (Hurston 117). Zora Hurston was the first African American to attend Barnard College. She published many successful books including her award winning autobiography. Hurston’s purpose of writing this essay, which was first published in 1928, was to share her positive experience of growing up as an African American. Even though Hurston faced some challenges throughout her life, she wanted to show the readers that she was pleased with her life and knew she had many opportunities. She was sharing her story with anyone who was interested in the black experience. In this essay, Hurston uses many rhetorical devices including imagery, personification and metaphors. Hurston uses imagery to describe the colors she experienced when she heard music – blue, red and yellow. She uses personification to describe the jazz orchestra as it played. The images of the sounds of the orchestra physically moving and attacking the music allow the reader to experience the sounds as she did. Hurston also uses the metaphor of people as various colored bags to show her audience that even though people of different races all look different on the outside, every person is the same on the inside. I believe that the author achieved her purpose because she was able to show her audience through her personal narrative that even in the presence of racial discrimination, she was happy with her life as a young African American woman.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-sh-zora-neale-hurston-google-doodle-20140107-story.html 

Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 114-17. Print.   

Bop

In the essay, Bop, Langston Hughes uses a discussion about the history of Be-Bop music between two friends to address the serious racial issues of his time which still occur to this day. Hughes makes a strong argument that the music genre Be-Bop can only truly be understood by African American people who have struggled with society’s treatment of them for hundreds of years. Langston Hughes was an African American writer who fought for equal rights while writing about his own experiences in his auto-biographies and fiction books. Hughes was a very respected author who became the first African American to achieve international success. This essay was written in 1949 to make every person throughout the United States aware of the horrible treatment of African American citizens by police officers. Hughes uses an informal tone for his first person narrative. This allows the reader to quickly feel comfortable with the characters as they talk on the stoop. He also uses many rhetorical devices to relate Be-Bop to racial issues. Several of these devices are imagery, onomatopoeia and personification. Hughes uses imagery in his vivid descriptions of potential interactions with police. The reader can easily imagine what is happening. Hughes uses onomatopoeia to represent the music that started when racial issues increased. At the beginning of Hughes’ essay, he allows his audience to hear the music of Be-Bop this then changes to hearing the sounds of the violence that African Americans had to struggle with in his time. Hughes creates more sound in his essay through the personification of the billy club as a speaking creature. I believe that Langston Hughes achieved his purpose of showing the racist treatment of African American people by the police through explaining the history of Be-Bop and relating it to the society in which he lived. Hughes was able to reach his audience by making them visualize and hear his experience.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coleman_Hawkins,_Miles_Davis_(Gottlieb_04001).jpg 

Hughes, Langston. "Bop." The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 190-92. Print.

Corn-Pone Opinions

Public opinion has been influencing peoples’ choices for thousands of years, especially in the areas of fashion, politics and religion. The peer pressure of public opinion causes many people to believe that they must change to fit in with the rest of the crowd. The essay Corn-Pone Opinions by Mark Twain was written around 1901 and focused on political, racial, and religious issues in America and England. Twain has written many successful fiction and non-fiction pieces in his career including the classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He created his own style of writing and used it to express his opinions on hypocrisy and prejudice. Twain’s purpose in writing this essay was to show the world how public opinion influences the daily lives of individuals in our society. Many people base the choices and beliefs in their daily lives on the opinions of other people and ignore their own self-opinion. “But as a rule our self-approval has its source in but one place and not elsewhere – the approval of other people” (Twain 2). In Mark Twain’s essay, he sets out to prove that peer-pressure has taken over the choices made by individuals. Twain includes personal anecdotes to help his audience understand his feelings about society’s pressure. He also uses other rhetorical devices including repetition and rhetorical questions to make his point. Twain wrote in a mode of exemplification giving numerous examples of peer pressure including fashion, manners, and politics. I believe that Mark Twain successfully achieved his purpose in this essay by his use of emotion and exemplification throughout this entire piece. This essay is still relevant to the world today because people continue to make their decisions based off of other people instead of realizing that their own self-opinion is most important. Mark Twain’s essay successfully encourages people to make their own decisions and to think for themselves.

https://ehistory.osu.edu/sites/ehistory.osu.edu/files/mmh/gildedage/PublicOpinion.jpg

 Twain, Mark. "Corn-pone Opinions." The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 1-3. Print.