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Does the color of a mother's skin matter? To an infant immersed in the warmth of its mother's body, suffused with the rainbow hues of her love, its belly full of her rich milk, the color of its mother's skin is immaterial. For the mother and the infant, enraptured with each other, their skins seeming to merge, black, brown, and white, all become one. It would indeed be an easy matter if such a state of nondistinction and undifferentiation could continue (easy in terms of avoidance of certain psychological struggles, but difficult, of course, in terms of creation of significant other psychological problems). We know it cannot. As soon as the child is aware of being an entity separate from the mother, the mother's skin color (and features), if markedly different from the child's, will raise perplexing questions about self-image and identity in the mind of the developing child.
It is precisely such a struggle that James McBride captures in his moving and disturbing book The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. McBride writes about growing up as one of twelve children born to his white, originally Jewish mother who married first one black man, and then, after he died, another one. He describes his confusion as a child about his mother's obvious difference from mothers of other black children: a difference she refused to acknowledge. He remembers asking her “Why don't you look like Rodney's mother, or Pete's mother? How come you don't look like me?” (McBride, p. 12), and her reply, “I do look like you. I'm your mother. You ask too many questions …” (McBride, p. 13). He notes also her clearly contradictory views of the colors of the world in which she lived. “White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard” (McBride, p. 29). He details his desperate attempts as a young child to dea