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Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held - so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place - who knows?

Zora Neale Hurston#3

DiscriminationEqualityHumanityValue

About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker feels discrimination but values human equality beneath surface differences.
In plain terms
I am astonished by denial of my company; all people contain mixed value.
What can you take from it?
People hold equal mix of value regardless of surface color.

Where it applies

  • social interaction
  • discrimination experiences
  • self-reflection

Putting it to work

  • look beyond color
  • value human contents

Questions to consider

  • Do we see value equally?
  • Why do we discriminate?

Another view

Real discrimination often ignores such internal similarities.

More from Zora Neale Hurston

  1. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the…

    Permalink to quote #2
  2. Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de d…

    Permalink to quote #4
  3. I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing s…

    Permalink to quote #1

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