Race, Identity, and Mixed-Race Families in The Color of Water
This paper explores racial identity, belonging, and the paradox of mixed-race family life through James McBride's memoir The Color of Water. McBride's experience growing up as a dark-skinned child with a white Jewish mother in 1950s and 1960s America forms the paper's central case study. The analysis draws a comparison with a 2011 New York Times article describing the experiences of Mrs. Greenwood, a dark-skinned woman raising a white biological child, to argue that public attitudes toward mixed-race families have changed remarkably little over five decades despite significant legal and social progress on civil rights.
- Introduction: Framing the mixed-race family paradox
- McBride's Identity and Racial Confusion: McBride's confusion growing up with white mother
- Public Reactions to Mixed-Race Families: Community hostility toward McBride's family
- A Modern Parallel: The Greenwood Case: 2011 account mirrors McBride's 1960s experience
- Conclusion: Racial attitudes persist despite legal progress
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses a direct textual comparison across two sources separated by fifty years, giving the argument a clear chronological anchor that illustrates persistence of racial bias.
- Supports claims with direct quotations from both McBride's memoir and the New York Times article, grounding observations in primary source evidence rather than abstract assertion.
- Identifies a specific structural paradox — a mixed-race family member treated as an outsider within their own family's racial context — and traces it consistently through both cases.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis: it places two sources in dialogue with each other, using the similarities between them to build an argument about the durability of racial attitudes in American society. Rather than treating each source separately, the student maps analogous figures (Rachel/Mrs. Greenwood, McBride/the white child) onto one another to show that the social dynamics have not fundamentally shifted.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a framing introduction that states the paradox and introduces both sources. The body develops in two main movements: first analyzing McBride's memoir for personal and communal reactions to his white mother, then shifting to the 2011 news account as a contemporary parallel. A brief analytical comment connects the two, and a short conclusion generalizes the finding about the persistence of racism despite legal reform.
Introduction
This paper examines the concept of racism and a paradox inherent in mixed-race families. Illustrations of these concepts can be found in James McBride's memoir The Color of Water. To provide contrast, the book is also considered alongside a 2011 article published in The New York Times that explores similar issues. The article quotes a white woman at a supermarket commenting on the apparent disparity in skin color between a mother and child: "It's just not possible…You're so...dark!" (Saulny). Even though decades separate the two works, it is striking to realize that many of the issues facing mixed-race families are essentially the same. Some members of a mixed-race family can be treated differently from other members of the same family based solely on their appearance and complexion, and this paradox is explored throughout the paper.
McBride's Identity and Racial Confusion
In The Color of Water, James McBride writes his own biography alongside the life story of his mother. McBride was dark in complexion and had the typical features of a Black man. His mother, Rachel Shilsky — a Jew by faith — was fair-skinned and was regarded as a white woman. Rachel married a Black minister and gave birth to eight children in the 1950s; after being widowed, she married a Black blacksmith and had four more children. McBride inherited his dark complexion from his Black father.
As McBride grew up, he found racial discrimination all around him. He was taught to perceive danger from white people and not to trust them. This created a paradox for him, since his own mother was white. As a child, questions of race, religion, and identity weighed heavily on his mind. He struggled to understand his place in a family that included a white member. In his own words, McBride writes: "I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn't want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds" (McBride). These words reveal how thoroughly confused McBride was by his mother's whiteness at a time when, all around him, white mothers had white children and Black mothers had Black children. As a child and an adolescent, he could not reconcile that reality with his own family.
Public Reactions to Mixed-Race Families
McBride also describes how others viewed his family. When they went out together, people would point at his mother and say, "Look at her with those little niggers!" (McBride). He writes that his mother's skin color often triggered the same sense of danger he had been taught since childhood to associate with white people. Meanwhile, white people in the neighborhood resented his mother for living in a Black world while being white. They could not understand how or why this had happened and remained deeply skeptical of the entire situation.
This hostility came from multiple directions. McBride's family existed in a social space that neither the white community nor the Black community fully accepted, illustrating the isolating effect that interracial family structures could produce in mid-twentieth-century America. Rather than being embraced by either group, the family was scrutinized and judged by both.
Conclusion
The comparison discussed in this paper illustrates the way a significant portion of people in America view racism. The enactment of strict anti-discrimination laws has not been able to completely erase feelings of racism from society. The way people view mixed-race families appears to have remained largely unchanged between the years when James McBride was growing up and the experiences of Mrs. Greenwood and her child in 2011, even though the two periods are separated by more than fifty years. The dynamics McBride depicts in the setting of the 1960s seem to be the same ones Mrs. Greenwood encountered in the twenty-first century, suggesting that legal reform alone is insufficient to transform deeply held racial attitudes.
References
McBride, James. The Color of Water. Print.
Saulny, S. (2011). In Strangers' Glances at Family, Tensions Linger. The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/for-mixed-family-old-racial-tensions-remain-part-of-life.html [Accessed 5 May 2015].
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