What is the main idea of the essay in what ways does race shape hurton’s sense of identity

One of the most prevalent themes in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is that race is a social construct—i.e. a human-invented and perpetuated classification system not based in essential biological differences. For hundreds of years, white settlers in the United States tried to justify genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African-descended people by arguing that biological differences meant non-white people were of a lower order of the human species, seeking to designate them as separate and inferior "races." The flawed and biased theory of biological racial difference has long been refuted by biologists, but we still live with the legacy of white supremacist hierarchical categorization. Hurston contributes to the idea of race being socially constructed by stating that she "became colored," only thinking of herself as "a little colored girl" when she was thirteen and lived among white people who projected their prejudices onto her. Rather than feeling her race as something essential encoded into her biology, Hurston notices her race in contexts where, for social reasons, her skin color sets her apart.