“Little White Lie”: Black And Jewish Filmmaker Documents Growing Up Believing She Was White |
“Little White Lie”: Black And Jewish Filmmaker Documents Growing Up Believing She Was White
Madame Noire
2014-08-04
Most of us know from a very early age that we’re Black. It happens so early that many of us can’t remember a specific conversation or moment where we learned this truth. But that wasn’t the case for 37-year-old Lacey Schwartz.
Schwartz, a Harvard Law School graduate turned filmmaker, didn’t learn she was black until she was 18 years old. While many of us would look at Schwartz, with her light brown skin and dark, curly hair and suspect immediately that she has at least some Black ancestry, she was told by her Jewish family that she was White and had inherited her dark skin from her Sicilian grandfather.
Her story is so fascinating, so remarkable, that she decided to make it the subject for her documentary Little White Lie which premiered at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this past weekend. It will eventually make its way to PBS next year.
The documentary, narrated, obviously, by Schwartz herself, details her at a funeral, discussions with her girlfriends and therapy sessions where she asks over and over again how she was able to “pass for white.”
In the film, Schwartz offers a bit of an explanation: “I come from a long line of New York Jews. My family knew who they were, and they defined who I was.”
Read the entire review here.
Tags: Lacey Schwartz, Madame Noire, Veronica Wells