A Tribute to Non-Conformity in James McBride's The Color of Water

In James Mc Bride's book The Color of Water, the black author describes the life of his white mother. McBride's mother was name Rachel Shilsky - who later changed her name to Ruth - and she grew up as a Jewish immigrant in the South. She abandoned her family and her religion in the late 1940's when she met and married her first black husband. As she raised her children with this man she adopted more black culture into her life than the one she was born into. When her first husband died she met and fell in love with another black man and married him as well. Betweeen both marriages Rachel, who changed her name to Ruth at a young age, bore twelve children who were half black, half white and though they did not know it until later in life, half Jewish.

Ruth is a good example of a person who both defies and bends to conformity. When she was a young girl she was teased and treated cruelly for being a Jewish girl by her classmates. She had few friends and the one she did have she had to hide from her father as he was against her becoming friendly with anyoen who was a gentile. Ruth found that she was more easily accepted and embraced by the black community as they did not judge her harshly or treat her cruelly because of her religion. Her love affairs with black men began when she was still a teen. She became pregnant by a boy she was seeing in this time. She aborted the pregnancy and the relationship ended but Ruth was changed forever.

What factors contribute to behaviors that lean towards conformity and non-conformity? Three experimenters - Muzafer Sherif, Solomon Asch, and Stanley Milgram - strove to answer this question.

Sherif performed an experiment in which participants were to guess the distance between two pinpoints of light on the wall. Once an average was reached when the participant was alone fake participants were brought in who provided an obviously false distance as an answer. After enough days of the fake participants providing false answers the real participant began to believe he saw the same distance they did even though the original distance never changed (Meyers 210). This study showed the power of suggestibility. When a group of people are insistant that a false belief is true the person in the group who initially knows it is false will eventually believe it is true as well. Ruth defied this particular trend in conformity. She lived in the South in a time when black people were considered to be very low on the social scale. Her own father hated them and she was raised hearing how awful, lazy, and stupid they were. According to Sherif's experiments she should have believed the same things, but she did not. She surrounded herself with black people and loved them deeply. She failed to conform to the ideals she was raised with.

Solomon Asch performed an experiment similar to Sherif's. In one of his experiments "Asch wondered: If several others gave the wrong answers, would people declare what they would have otherwise denied? Although some people never conformed, three-quarters did at least once" (Meyers 214). In many ways Ruth lived the life of the one-quarter who refused to conform.

"Milgram's experiments tested what happens when the demands of conscience" (Meyers 215). In his experiment participants were to teach fake subjects pairs of words, and when they made mistakes in recitation participants were to deliver shocks of increasing intensity. When researchers ordered participants to deliver shocks of torturous intensity, and participants heard the fake subjects scream in agony, it was expected that they would refuse and abandon the experiment. In reality more than half carried the experiment out to the end by continuing to do the will of perceived authority. Ruth defied this type of authority stimulated conformity examined in this experiment. Her father did not want her to leave, yet she did anyway. Society itself was against the romantic pairings of white women with black men and she married two. Authority figures had little effect on whether or not Ruth conformed.

Why did Ruth choose to go against what others thought and were doing? Why did she choose a life of non-conformity? There are a number of reasons why some people beat the odds and choose not to conform to society's standards. "Individuals value their sense of freedom and self-efficacy. So when social pressure becomes so blatant that it threatens their sense of freedom, they often rebel" (Meyers 238). Ruth's father was a very strict and unloving man. He wanted to control her life and use her as a work horse. He also wanted her married off to any Jewish boy who would be interested in her. Ruth rebelled against this by abandoning him and his beliefs, though it cost her emotionally. Ruth was also more open minded than most in the time period in which she lived. She knew what it was to be discriminated against as a Jewish girl and perhaps that is why she was able to handle the negativity of others surrounding her bi-racial marriage and children.

Ruth was a strong woman. Her life was had but she did the best she could and made the best choices possible for herself. She did not have to conform to experience love twice. She did not have to follow her parents' religion to experience a faith in God. She did not have to fit the image of an ideal mother to raise twelve successful children. She did well in her life and part of that can be attributed to her not being willing to conform.

Works Cited:

McBride, James (1996). The Color of Water. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group

Meyers, David G. (2005). Social Psychology (8th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill