Talk to The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as one of twelve children raised by a white Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity and married a Black minister. His mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, refused to discuss her past. The Color of Water is McBride's account of his own coming-of-age and his mother's story — told in alternating chapters, his in first person, hers reconstructed from interviews — as he finally pieces together who she was.
Ruth McBride was born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland, brought to the United States as a child, raised in rural Virginia by a rabbi father who was by her account violent and financially exploitative, and later escaped to New York, where she became pregnant by a Black boyfriend, converted to Christianity, and eventually married twice into the Black community. She raised all twelve of her children to pursue education with a ferocity that brooked no argument. Eight of them earned graduate degrees.
What it gets right
- 1.
Children of parents who refuse to discuss their past inherit the emotional residue of those silences without the context to understand them.
- 2.
Ruth's insistence on education was not abstract — it was a strategy rooted in her own experience of vulnerability and her understanding that credentials provided protection her children's skin color would not.
- 3.
Identity is not singular. McBride grew up racially Black in a culturally complex household, raised by a Jewish-born Christian mother, shaped by two churches and multiple communities.
What it covers
Who wrote it
James McBride is an American author and musician born in Brooklyn in 1957. He is the son of Ruth McBride Jordan, whose story forms the center of The Color of Water. He studied journalism at Oberlin College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a trained jazz musician and has composed music for theater and film. The Color of Water, his debut memoir published in 1996, has sold more than three million copies. His subsequent work includes the novels The Good Lord Bird, which won the National Book Award in 2013, and Deacon King Kong.
