Readings with Similar Themes

If you enjoyed or are enjoying this years SPC READS choice, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother. Check out these other titles with similar themes.

Ace of Spades: A Memoir
by David Matthews

Born to a black father and a white mother, David Matthews spent his first twenty years straddling his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined life of white privilege. The disappearance of his Jewish mother, coupled with the brutal necessity of choosing a racial identity in the segregated inner-city, would define and complicate the world he so vividly brings to life in this remarkable coming-of-age story. ACE OF SPADES begins precisely where the American dream ends. In the Baltimore of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Matthews lives in the mostly black world of his grandmother and father. Shrewdly deducing that he might use his phantom mother’s skin color as a way to escape some, if not all, of the indignities heaped on mixed race, motherless sons, Matthews recounts his internecine battles with evil stepmother-types, public education and mating with equal parts piss and vinegar, love and hope. David Matthews is a writer living in New York. He has discussed race on The Tavis Smiley Show, the CBS Sunday Morning Show, and in the pages of People Magazine.

Honky
by Dalton Conley

As recalled in Honky, Dalton Conley’s childhood has all of the classic elements of growing up in America. But the fact that he was one of the few white boys in a mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side makes Dalton’s childhood unique.