How does the text "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" say what it does and represent its contents? What are some elements of genre, structure, form,...

"How It Feels to Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston is a personal essay. This means that it addresses the issue of race not by making generalizations or using statistics but by recounting examples of her personal experience. Thus genre and point of view both invite us to understand blackness through the eyes of the narrator rather than as something impersonal.

The term "ethos" means argument grounded in the character of the speaker. This...

"How It Feels to Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston is a personal essay. This means that it addresses the issue of race not by making generalizations or using statistics but by recounting examples of her personal experience. Thus genre and point of view both invite us to understand blackness through the eyes of the narrator rather than as something impersonal.

The term "ethos" means argument grounded in the character of the speaker. This is the primary form of argument used in the essay as it relies on self-portraiture to create authority intrinsically. This is particularly important because one of the main themes of the essay is that the issue of being "colored" or that of race in general only arises when a person is placed in a context in which there is racial conflict or discrimination. Hurston points out that growing up in Eatonville, Florida, she didn't really have a sense of her ethnicity as defining her and her relationships to other people. 

One of the main logical devices she uses is comparison. When she compares herself with a white person in a jazz club, she feels superior in the way she can immerse herself in the music. This leads to the sense that although discrimination exists, slavery is far, in the past and in fact many aspects of black culture are superior to that of white culture. 

Her appeal to pathos is mainly a refusal to be "tragically colored," which appeals to the way her audience admires strength of character. The insistence on people being individuals rather than defined by race and the empathy she builds in sharing her personal viewpoint both lead to the final argument that people should not be defined merely by skin color but by all the complex elements of their characters.