Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” can best be understood in its historical and cultural context, namely the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance.Americans of the twentieth century had lived through an unprecedented world war. In revolt against the perceived waste of human lives and the bankrupt morality that allowed death on such a massive scale during World War I, many Americans, especially younger Americans, eagerly embraced the modern world left in the aftermath of the war. Because of developments in transportation, communication, and manufacturing, this world was one that moved at a faster pace than that of the generation before.This new culture valued what was new and what was modern, not tradition and the past.

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of a confluence of trends in this more modern culture. Some modernists were fascinated with what they perceived as primitive cultures, which they saw as an antidote to the hypocrisy of tradition.Primitivism celebrated primitive culture, arts, and music as more authentic and more in touch with the deep instincts and human drives highlighted by psychologist Sigmund Freud. African-Americans, the most accessible “primitive” culture to white Americans, became a central focus of white interests.

African-Americans, shaped by many of the same forces as their white peers, took this opening to make a place for an art and culture of their own, one worthy of celebration and one capable (they hoped) of showing nonblacks that African-Americanswere capable of producing art that justified a place at the American table.