The Color of Water

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1996

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-18

Chapters 19-22

Chapter 23-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Growing Up With a Diverse Racial Background in America

The dominant conflict in The Color of Water is James’s profound racial dissonance as the son of a white Jewish mother and a Black man.

As a child, James questions why he looks different from his mother. In the 1960s, the emergence of the Black Power movement highlights James’s inability to know where and how he fits. James is attracted to the fashion and iconography associated with the movement, but he is also susceptible to the media narrative about Black Power and its most visible and controversial auxiliary group, the Black Panthers. As he watches white newscasters incite panic over the supposed threat the Panthers pose to white America, James concludes that the Black Power movement must logically be a threat to his white mother. This panic culminates in an incident in which he punches the adolescent son of a Black Panther because he believes the boy’s father is going to try to kill Ruth.

James’s precarious tightrope walk between white and Black America continues. In middle school and high school, white students literally ask James to dance for them, assuming he can move like James Brown simply because he is a person of color. He complies, and despite a performance that would have inspired jeers and ridicule from his Black peers, the white students believe he is the best dancer they’ve ever seen. In college, James reflexively modulates his language and behavior depending on the skin color of those around him. For example, when he receives a letter from his former employer, a wealthy white woman, stating that her husband died, James agrees with a Black classmate who dismisses the woman’s pain because of her race and class—and then feels immediately ashamed for this fake callousness.

His racial identity crisis persists in the professional world, as he struggles to fit in with both white journalists, who are often paternalistic or tyrannical, and Black journalists, who he believes are too willing to fetishize their own racial hardship.

All of this confusion serves as the impetus for James to write The Color of Water. While his investigation into his mother’s personal history and heritage does little to solve his identity crisis, it provides a perspective that steels his resolve to be a better father, husband, and son. The closest James comes to a unified theory of navigating America’s fraught racial landscape is to embrace the platitude that people should love one another. In the book’s 10th anniversary Afterword, he writes:

There will be reams of books and newspapers and video footage and movies that will attempt to answer the unanswerable questions of racism, sexism, classism, and socioeconomics for [Ruth]—hard-line intellectuals have already had a field day with this book, using it to promote every sort of socio-political ideology. But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That’s what counts (294).

While some readers may be left dissatisfied by the fact that James reaches no larger conclusion about race in America, the author is honest in his refusal to provide answers he does not have.

The Layered Nature of Privilege

Given James’s unique cultural heritage, he has an extraordinarily nuanced view of racial and socioeconomic privilege. In the Jim Crow South, James’s white Jewish mother Ruth enjoyed the privilege of attending better-funded and better-maintained white schools, but experienced antisemitic attacks in school and discriminatory housing policies in the town. At the same time, the discrimination she saw as a Jew paled in comparison to the ever-present mortal threat Black men and women faced in her hometown. For example, while Ruth would have been ostracized had her relationship with Peter been exposed, the Ku Klux Klan or perhaps by individuals she calls “regular” white men would have likely murdered Peter.

Later, as a white woman living with a Black man in predominantly Black communities in the North, Ruth faces discrimination from white and Black people alike. In an extreme case, a Black woman neighbor slaps Ruth in the face with no provocation. However, the hate she and Peter received from white people was actually life threatening: They ran away from a lynch mob not in the Jim Crow South, but on 126th Street in Manhattan. Later, multiple incidents involving Ruth’s children and the police show that the racism her children face comes from the state, with all the power it wields to take away a person’s life or freedom.

James also observes various gradations of privilege within Black communities on an intergenerational level. James’s stepfather Hunter, who was born at the end of the 19th century and thus faced an everyday assault on his rights and his body through near-ubiquitous racism enshrined at every level of the government, views his stepdaughter Helen’s refusal to attend her top private arts high school as a waste of her privilege. Yet to Helen’s generation, which comes of age during the Black Power movement, merely going to school with white kids is not enough. She resents the system that limits Black economic advancement and continually puts her siblings in the crosshairs of the police, no matter how much education they obtain.

James observes even more layers of privilege in the professional world. While working in top newsrooms in the Northeast, he sees white women lose promotions to less experienced Black men. In turn, those Black men answer to white bosses with paternalistic or tyrannical attitudes toward subordinates. Further, in his capacity as a reporter, James interviews plenty of white people whose hardships he judges to be greater than his own.

Finally, James considers the privilege of his own generation versus that of the young Black men who come of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Although James and his siblings face their share of harassment from the police, the racism and brutality of law enforcement directed against Black individuals only increases during the War on Drugs and the era of mass incarceration. Although racial biases always existed in police forces—and, indeed, in the Jim Crow South authorities were frequently complicit in lynchings—the institutional incentives to lock up young men of color ballooned in the 1980s and 1990s, tearing apart families and dividing communities.

The Inescapable Legacy of One’s Cultural Heritage

When Ruth converts to Christianity after Tateh disowns her, she endeavors to bury her Jewish heritage so deeply that she never has to think about it ever again. The trauma associated with her sexual abuse at her father’s hands and the loss of her mother and siblings is too great for her to bear.

Yet James repeatedly points out that for all of Ruth’s efforts to forget her cultural heritage, it influences her as she raises her children. For example, Ruth insists on her children attending predominantly Jewish schools. Of Ruth’s childrearing tactics, James writes:

On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education (29).

Just as Ruth cannot ignore the enduring influence of her Jewish heritage, there are also serious consequences to her refusal to acknowledge her whiteness to her children. Her race-neutral approach only exacerbates the intense racial confusion James experiences for decades. Moreover, by largely refusing to acknowledge race in her household, Ruth does not fully prepare her children for the treatment they will receive because they are people of color, particularly from the police. Ruth ignoring race won’t prevent the police from arresting Richie without cause or hauling David into court on a minor traffic violation.

Ultimately, the only way for James to cope with his scrambled view of his own identity is to rip open the wounds of his and his mother’s past by writing this book. While he admits that he doesn’t reach any grand conclusions about race, class, or religion, the process has a profoundly healing effect on his psyche. By examining the Jewish side of his identity, he ensures that he won’t repeat the past and that Mameh’s difficult life and early death were not in vain.