How It Feels to be Colored Me

In the essay “How It Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Hurston, the author describes her experiences as an African American in a time with racism ruled. Hurston ends her essay by comparing people to a “brown bag” staffed with “random stuff” and they will still all be equal. In my personal opinion, I strongly agree with Hurston’s statement. I believe people should not be judge by their appearance or color. I also think there should be no stereotypes because is not fair that people get expectations from other races without knowing them. Hurston’s agree with every understanding of race that I have since her opinions of race are similar as mine. The only new perspective that this novel brought me was that the more isolated that we are from other cultures, the more difficult it is to understand our own. What I mean by this is that if we only know what our culture “means” and we don’t open to explore other cultures, we might not going to be able the intensity that our culture has on others. This actually made me realized that sometimes even I locked myself with my culture that I don’t even bother to get the chance of meeting new people from different cultures.

“They Joys of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”

In the Novel “They Joys of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, the author talks about how him, as an Indian boy, “broke the walls” of the negative expectations that his culture had of Indians succeeding. Just like Alexie struggled with Indian’s stereotypes, also did I. I as an Hispanic man, have faced many obstacles as; culturally, linguistically and also stereotypical. When I first moved to the U.S. I didn’t know anything about their culture, beliefs or their educational system. My first year studying on this side of the border (the U.S.) was a nightmare. I remember having teachers who would come to the ESL classroom and only talk to Hispanics about attending to summer school at the beginning of my school year. At the beginning, I couldn’t understand the reason for it, if there were Asians in my classroom too until I realized that their expectations of Hispanics failing were higher than Asians. When I attended to High School, I started realizing that their expectations of Hispanics dropping out weren’t wrong. The only thing that made me different from them was that I actually wanted to succeed and demonstrate how stereotypes couldn't affect me of getting my education. I started working on my grammar, my spelling and my involvement with different races so I could learn about how their methods to study were. I knew I was going to work extra hard to get where others were, but I was decided to “break the walls” as Alexie did.