The color of water

¶ … Color of Water is an autobiographical account of the lives of the author, James McBride and his white mother Ruth, and explores issues of racial prejudice and religious discrimination. While the author's journey as an African-American is important, it cannot be read in the same context as other commonly known stories of suffering and prejudice in the South. This is because James McBride's story was influenced and defined by the perpetual presence of a white person in his life, his mother. In other words James' mother Ruth McBride played an extremely important role in the way her children perceived racism and related problems.

While white people have always been severely criticized for their mistreatment of other races, this book gives us a different image of whites. The book explains that not all white people are racist and that for some such folks, forces of love and affection are superior to all other forces including that of race and color. Ruth belonged to a white Jewish family that moved from Poland to United States and encountered discrimination on account of its faith.

Growing up in Virginia, she realized that the world was sharply divided into various colors and faiths and that some of them were superior to others. Discrimination was thus a problem not exclusively encountered by blacks but could also be faced by people who did not follow the majority religion. For Ruth, her faith became a problem at school where she would be called "Christ killer," or "Jew Baby" (McBride, p. 40).

But discrimination was not limited to school alone, Ruth was astonished to discover that her own family was quite racist in its beliefs. Her family would discriminate against African-Americans in the same way that other whites did. When she decided to marry a black person Andrew McBride, her father and others refused to speak to her and completely shunned her. She was declared dead and her family mourned her marriage decision in the same way they would mourn someone's death. "My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva. That's how Orthodox Jews mourn their dead. They say prayers, turn their mirrors down, sit on boxes for seven days, and cover their heads. It's a real workout, which is maybe why I'm not a Jew now." (p. 2) This was another kind of discrimination, which made it clear that racial prejudice was not an exclusive attribute of white Christians; it was something that pervaded every culture, race and faith.

After her marriage to Andrew, she severed all ties with her family and devoted herself completely to her husband and children. However her marriage to a black man further complicated her life, as she would be face prejudice in various forms when she traveled with her black family. People would wonder what a white woman was doing with a black man since interracial marriages were not yet socially acceptable. McBride claims that her mother was far ahead of her time and would simply ignore racist comments:

Most white folks I knew seemed to have a great fear of blacks...I could see it in the faces of the white people who stared at me and Mommy and my siblings when we rode the subway, sometimes laughing at us, pointing, muttering things like, 'Look at her with those little niggers.' I remember when a white man shoved her angrily as she led a group of us onto an escalator, but Mommy simply ignored him. I remember two black women pointing at us, saying, 'Look at that white *****,' and a white man screaming at Mommy somewhere in Manhattan, calling her a 'nigger lover.'"

Ruth experienced all kinds of racial and religious discrimination and prejudice in her life but refused to succumb to these negative forces. She never regretted her decision to marry two black men and was well aware of the fact that prejudice was a result of man's lack of education and knowledge. While the rest of the world around her was debating which race was superior to the other, she would tell her children that "God is the color of water" (McBride, p.51) thus holding on to her color-blind beliefs and views.

Ruth and her children were strangled by a society that couldn't accept them as they were. While she encountered prejudice in a black society for being white, her children battled against racist attitude of white folks but this helped them develop a more balanced view on this issue than other African-American children. Ruth would have left the black society if she could but knew that in a white world, she simply wouldn't be accepted as interracial marriages were absolutely unheard of. "I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay... With whites it was no question. You weren't accepted to be with a black man and that was that" (232).