Color Of Water Reflection

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Oscar Garcia Mrs. Watkins AP Language and Composition 17 August 2015 Reflecting on my Reading of The Color of Water I really admire Frances because of how open and kind she is to Ruth despite peer pressure not to. Especially in a time where minorities were discriminated upon harshly, it is admirable that Frances is able to immediately hit it off with Ruth simply because she “’has the prettiest hair. Let’s be friends’” (McBride 81). Even nowadays, where a lot of standards and perceptions of others are chalked up to have high expectations, to be able to indiscriminately decide to make friends regardless of political or social standards is something worth valuing. I can’t really understand why James punched the child of the man who was in…show more content…
In the book, James and his family experience innumerable hardships, including but not limited to segregation, discrimination, education, peer pressure within their respective communities, and being disowned by their families. Although these problems exist, they are much less prominent; intentional segregation is illegal and enforced as well as discrimination, education is more widely available, albeit college education is harder to attain, and there is continually a push within all communities for its youth to succeed. And although they still existed in James’s case, opportunities of many varieties are more widely available now than…show more content…
Ruth continued to be left out in school, continuously treated differently by other white kids at the time. All the while, Ruth feels the same desires expected of a teenage girl; she wanted to dance, she wanted to have new clothes, she wanted to be in style. Even so, Tateh wouldn’t enable her. As a result, she turns to her black friends, who “never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, ‘Come as you are.’ Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting” (McBride 109-110). As a teenager, Ruth is able to find a more welcoming and accepting atmosphere in the black community, in contrast to the ridiculing nature of the whites
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