The Color Of Water Identity Essay

Discovering one's identity is a universal conquest, one that some never complete. While much of a person’s identity is usually shaped during their childhood by the influences of their family and environment, some struggle to define themselves stuck in the shadow of their parents. In The Color of Water, an autobiography by James McBride, he writes about his experiences and challenges growing up in the 1960s and 70s in a multi-racial family with a white, Jewish mother. The memoir tells the story of the complicated childhood of both James and his mother Ruth, and how Ruth’s actions and methods of raising her children affected James as he grew up. McBride shows how James explores aspects of his identity while starting out as a naive, impulsive

But after a while of James being surrounded by black kids and their parents, because he lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, he began to notice how his mother stood out among the others. “I began to notice something about my mother, that she looked nothing like the other kids’ mothers… I noticed that Mommy stood apart from the other mothers, rarely speaking to them… She’d quickly grasp my hand as I stepped off the bus, ignoring the stares of the black women as she whisked me away. One afternoon as we walked home from the bus stop, I asked Mommy why she didn’t look like the other mothers.” (McBride, 21). Because James’ mother never talked about race, always brushing the topic off, he never understood why his mother seemed so different compared to the others. Race was not something that was described in detail to James as he grew up and thus left him confused on the matter and wondering why he and his mother looked like different people. His confusion only grew as he got older and over time he stopped asking the questions, only learning what was talked about in front of him never getting direct answers. James was sent to camp every summer,

James relied heavily on his mother during his childhood but as he grew older he realized that he struggled so much because he never knew where she fit in. “It took many years to find out who she was, partly because I never knew who I was. It wasn’t so much a question of searching for myself as it was my own decision not to look. As a boy, I was confused about issues of race but did not consider myself deprived or unhappy. As a young man I had no time or money or inclination to look beyond my own poverty to discover what identity was.” (McBride, 134). To James, finding out who he was never was a main priority until he got older. As a child he was sheltered, as a teenager, he was too focused on everything else in life, and finally, as an adult took the time to fix the identity crisis that had been lurking in the back of his mind. For James, college was the time that he was finally free of his mother’s influence, and spend time reflecting on the years prior. “It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous “white man’s world” wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, and religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too.” (McBride, 135). Growing up, James always struggled to find a place that he thought he