Identity Crisis In The Color Of Water By James Mcbride

James McBride’s The Color of Water, is a memoir that weaves the story of his Polish mother’s struggle to raise twelve mulatto children in Brooklyn’s Red Hook housing projects with his own conflicting identity crisis. The book's narrator alternates between James himself and his mother Ruth McBride, through interviews he’s done with her. The story starts off narrated by Ruth in which she tells her son some of the details of her early childhood and family dynamic. She reveals to James, that she was born in Poland to an Orthodox-Jewish family on on April 1, 1921. Once her family immigrated to the U.S, her name was changed from Ruchel Dwarja Aylska, to Ruth, a more American name. Her mother, Mameh, was a very kind woman, who was left disabled on her left side due to childhood polio. Her father who she called Tateh, was an Orthodox Rabbi who sexually abused Ruth as a child

Realising his Rabi career could not support the family on it’s own, he opened a store on the black side of town, where he overpriced his goods and was blatantly racist towards his customers.Seeing the constant lynchings of African-Americans as well as her father’s mistreatment towards them, Ruth connected with them, and admired their resilient

Hunter treated all twelve of Ruth’s children as his own and they all admired him as such. He even devoted his life savings to buying the family a house in St. Albans, Queens. As James grew older he began to question the racial identity of his mother due to conflicts with his own identity. His mother always dismissed him due to her disregard for race given their financial situation. Once realising his mother was white, the news reports and articles on the 1960s Black Panther Party movement made James fearful for his mother's life. Ruth continued to make sure her children worked hard in school and never bother to clarify them on her