Color Of Water

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Adults tend to believe that repeating simple phrases such as “Everyone is equal”, or “The color of your skin does not matter” will liquidate all their children’s thoughts relating to discrimination. Adults are convinced that by doing this, they are creating color-blind environments for their children; yet what they do not know is children develop this bias at an early age. In the memoir, The Color of Water, by James McBride, Mommy's theory of dealing with questions of race and ethnicity have a negative influence on James's search for identity. By refraining from having fully explained conversations about race with James, she is putting him in a position where he begins to differentiate whites from blacks and question what race he identifies …show more content…
This causes James to question what race he identifies himself as. In The Color of Water, the texts states, “Am I black or white?’ ‘You’re a human being,’ she snapped. ‘Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!’ ‘Will I be a black nobody or just a nobody?’ ‘If you’re a nobody,’ she said dryly, ‘it doesn’t matter what color you are.’ ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said” (McBride 92) This shows that Ruth is not giving fully explained information about race with understandable terms to James. Furthermore, in “See Baby Discriminate”, Bronson states, “To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakable terms that children understand” (Bronson 53). Therefore, by not having these conversations fully explained, they are being proven ineffective, leaving him to continue questioning what race he …show more content…
Visiting these places has allowed James to obtain more background knowledge about Ruth and himself, mostly relating to his racial identity. In The Color of Water, McBride says, “A penetrating loneliness covered me, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and a new awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt was gone” (McBride 229). This shows that the little boy James has been referring to in the previous chapters was slowly fading away; his identity is becoming clearer and clearer. Furthermore, in See Baby Discriminate, Bronson states, “They still didn't know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase ‘skin like ours.’ And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own. As these kids searched for their identities, skin color had become salient” (Bronson 38). This shows that lack of racial knowledge has made these kids go and search for their own identities. In this case, James took a trip to Suffolk to learn more about himself and his family history to discover his
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