Lacey Schwartz came to terms with her true racial identity in ‘Little White Lie’ |
Lacey Schwartz came to terms with her true racial identity in ‘Little White Lie’
The New York Daily News
2014-11-30
Justin Rocket Silverman, Senior Features Writer
Documentary film chronicles how she grew up believing she was a white Jewish girl and then learned her biological father was black
Lacey Schwartz didn’t know she was black — until the college she applied to classified her as that.
“I come from a long line of New York Jews,” the 37-year-old filmmaker says in “Little White Lie,” her new documentary feature. “I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. I actually grew up believing I was white.”
The story of how Schwartz came to understand her real identity is the subject of “Little White Lie,” now playing in select theaters. The movie is more than a decade in the making, as Schwartz began filming herself in her college dorm room and in sessions with her therapist, often in tears, as she struggled to understand who, and what, she is.
That story began in 1968, the year her white Jewish parents were married. Her mom got a job that same year at a playground in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and met a black man there who would become Schwartz’s biological father. But Schwartz’s mom never told her husband that her child wasn’t really his. Instead, the baby’s dark complexion was explained as a genetic echo of an Italian grandfather…
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Tags: Justin R. Silverman, Justin Rocket Silverman, Justin Silverman, Lacey Schwartz, Little White Lie, New York Daily News, The New York Daily News