What is the author's purpose for writing "How It Feels to Be Colored Me”?

In her famous short essay "How To Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston makes a powerful statement about identity, particularly African American identity, in the early decades of 20th century America. Through personal anecdotes and vivid imagery, Hurston illustrates that she confidently embraces who she is and feels that others should do the same.
Hurston's essay acknowledges the challenges she has faced ever since she "became colored" (paragraph 2). However, her attitude toward her race is very positive, so she does not dwell on oppression or racism. Instead, she celebrates herself. Hurston was a naturally outgoing girl who liked to sit on the porch and greet passersby. When she was young, Hurston admits that she didn't feel different from white people, only that she knew they did not live in her town (4). Hurston recognizes that once she moves out of the all-black town in which she grew up (Eatonville, also the town in which she sets her famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God), she stands out more from those around her. She "became a fast brown" (5), but she quickly follows that statement with the claim "But I am not tragically colored" (6). Hurston did not and does not wallow in misery at her position but instead uses it as a starting point for an argument about individuality. Hurston says that even in situations where she "feels [her] race," she maintains a strong sense of identity. Hurston insists, "through it all, I remain myself" (10).
Hurston's purpose becomes most clear near the end of the essay when she introduces an extended simile:

...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. (17)

Hurston says she is "like a brown bag" full of various contents which represent the different aspects of an individual's identity or experiences. She gives some examples, like "an empty spool" and "old shoes." The items listed are symbolic because they can also represent abstract concepts beyond the items themselves. Those "old shoes" are "saved for a road that never was and ever will be." This symbol taps into common human experiences of disappointments or dashed dreams. If the bags were all emtpied and refilled with a random jumble of these objects, she thinks they would not be that different than they were before. Hurston's point becomes most explicit when she says "A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter." The subtext here is that race does not matter. Hurston believes that there is a similar human spirit, that what unites us, and what we share is more important than those small, arbitrary distinctions between us. She goes as far as to say that this is probably what God ("the Great Stuffer of Bags") intended anyway.
Hurston confidently asserts that people are more alike than they are different, but she also celebrates the individuality of herself, and, by extension, suggests that others should be proud of who they are and not dwell on what separates them from other people.