The Color of Water

Through Ruth’s story, James paints a stark portrait of racism and antisemitism in the Jim Crow South during the Depression Era, exploring The Layered Nature of Privilege and discrimination through the divide between Jewish and Black communities.

Although Ruth is permitted to attend the white-only school in Suffolk, her classmates call her antisemitic slurs with impunity. In addition, Jews in Suffolk face housing discrimination practices like rental and mortgage rules that only favor white Protestants. Still, the discrimination her Jewish family faces is measurably different from what Black communities face in the Jim Crow South. Aside from anti-Black housing discrimination, de rigueur in both the North and South throughout the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black terrorists are a ubiquitous threat. Complicating their status further, some Jewish people, like Ruth’s father, are racist against Black Americans despite experiencing discrimination themselves. Ruth points out that a large number of congregants at her family’s synagogue are aghast that Tateh’s general store serves the town’s Black population. Tateh doesn’t open the store for the benefit of underserved communities—an outspoken racist, he relishes the opportunity to overcharge his Black customers.

James is understandably sensitive to broader conflicts in Jewish and Black relations. As two oppressed groups, many Jewish and Black people felt a kinship fortified by the aforementioned housing discrimination policies that excluded both groups from white non-Jewish neighborhoods. Aided by a greater awareness of racism in the wake of the Holocaust, Jews became important figures during the Civil Rights Era, culminating in 1965 when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Birmingham. The tragic 1964 murders of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were killed along with Black civil rights activist James Chaney by anti-Black terrorists during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, also strengthened this alliance.

Alongside the plethora of divides the book explores—Black versus white, Black versus Jew, Jew versus Gentile—James adds another: the Jim Crow generation versus the Black Power generation. When James’s sister Helen, sick of her “white man’s education” (73), drops out of school, his stepfather Hunter struggles to make sense of it. Hunter, who was born at the end of the 19th century, has faced a very different set of institutional and personal prejudices than Helen: “[Hunter] was an old-timer who called school ‘schoolin’ and called me ‘boy.’ He had run off from Jim Crow in the South and felt that education, any education, was a privilege. Helen was far beyond that” (77). Although the victories of the civil rights movement were profound, young people like Helen expect more than an end to only the most egregious forms of state-sanctioned discrimination. She expects real political and economic power. Instead of trying to win a modicum of that power by excelling in Manhattan private schools and Ivy League institutions—as many of her siblings do, including James—she vies to expand the power of her community, which she believes she cannot accomplish through education alone.

These chapters feature the line that gives the book its title. Unable to fathom the emotional complexity that causes his mother cry in church, James wonders if Ruth cries because God loves Black people better than white people, and Ruth wishes she were Black. When he asks her if God is white or Black, a question further complicated by the prevailing iconography that casts Jesus as a bearded white man, she responds, “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color” (50). Although this explanation satisfies James in the moment, as he grows older, he challenges his mother’s race-neutral approach as he confronts The Inescapable Legacy of One’s Cultural Heritage. Restless for definitive answers to his racial predicament, he acknowledges the social and economic divisions that so often fall along racial lines and which are impossible to ignore.