Identity In Mcbride's The Color Of Water

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Searching for a place and an identity of your own is a plight shared by many. Many people find belonging and understanding of the self within communities of beliefs, culture, or dialect. Others however, do not easily fit in with any community, and as a result are forced to explore and wander until they find their own place to belong. This situation applies to both James McBride and his mother Ruth McBride Jordan in The Color of Water. While McBride first attempted to define himself by his exterior, he is finally able to reach self-understanding when he learns that having humanity is more powerful than any racial division.
For most of McBride’s life, he was searching and wishing for an identity to call his own. He was not entirely black or white; …show more content…

Up until this point, McBride’s life had been defined by disconnection and uncertainty. As a child, he understood that his family was different when he noticed that “mommy looked different than the other mothers” (13). Being a bi-racial kid with only a white parent proved to be even more difficult as he got older and dealt with more pressures from his peers. During this time, he felt the pain of isolation so acutely that he would get angry at ‘the boy in the mirror’ (his reflection) for “not having to worry about having a white mommy” (28). Even as he got older, the confusion did not stop. He nearly dropped out of school, hung out with bums on the corner, joined a black soul band, and made friends with all the radical black students in college. McBride spent most of his life trying to carve out a black identity for himself. So his moment in Suffolk, walking along the canal and sensing the connection to his deceased grandmother, feeling relief and a release from his yearning shows that he has finally found what he is looking for. Before, he tried to define himself by how he looked (since that was how society defined him); now, he truly understands who he is: a human with rich ethnic background, but a human above

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