Social Justice In James Mcbride's The Color Of Water

James McBride’s memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother not only tells the story of his own life but also tells the story of his mother’s life. The book looks at the author’s life experiences as a person of mixed race, his struggle with his own identity, and the discrimination that his mother, Ruth, endured from individuals due to her religion, as well as the injustices she faced from her own father due to her relationship with men of a different race and religion. While the notion of discrimination based on race, religion, or ethnicity may seem simplistic, this memoir recounts the plethora of instances where mother and son were faced with great injustices. The title notes that the book is a “Black Man’s Tribute
However, before I discuss the complex issue of social justice and its relationship to the injustices of the book, I must first define what social justice is. Social justice essentially refers to the concept in which all individuals of a society are treated fairly and receive a proportionate amount of the benefits of society. To be precise, BusinessDictionary.com, cites social justices as “fair and proper administration of laws conforming to the natural law that all persons, irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc., are to be treated equally and without prejudice.” As I will outline, there are countless instances in James McBride’s memoir in which the concept social justice was certainly not
Both Ruth and James, while still haunted with the injustices faced, have come to grips with their heritage, which has made them who they are. While, I personally can’t imagine the hardships that a multi-racial person faced not long ago in our country’s history, I can admire and appreciate the immense difficulty and struggle that a person has between two different groups of people that they love. While things in terms of racial and religious discrimination are less out in the open as they were just decades ago and progress has been made, people still face the injustices of being treated differently simply because they don’t look like the predominant group in a society. James McBride’s memoir shows that regardless of race or religion we are all people and we all have the same feelings and desires in life and that while being of multi-racial background may have been seen as a detriment to him in the past, it appears to me that it has enriched his life and made him a very strong willed