Growing Up White Until a Family Secret Revealed She Was NotPosted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2015-03-24 17:35Z by Steven |
Growing Up White Until a Family Secret Revealed She Was Not
The Root
2015-03-22
Genetta M. Adams, Senior Editor
In the documentary Little White Lie, filmmaker Lacey Schwartz spins a compelling story about embracing her racial identity.
Lacey Schwartz grew up as a white, Jewish girl in the predominantly white community of Woodstock, N.Y., raised by Peggy and Robert Schwartz. But what she didn’t know at the time was that her biological father was black.
The idea of “passing” for white has long been a part of African-American culture. But Schwartz’s story isn’t one about passing. She truly believed that she was white.
How she came to embrace her biracial identity and confront her parents about the family secret is the subject of her documentary, Little White Lie, which airs Monday on PBS as part of its Independent Lens series.
Judging someone’s racial identity by appearance alone can be tricky—the recent story about Nancy Giles’ reaction to Jay Smooth makes that point fairly obvious. But when Schwartz was a child, her light-brown skin and curly hair elicited comments from people outside her immediate family circle: At her bat mitzvah, a woman from the synagogue mistook Lacey for an Ethiopian Jew.
When Schwartz questioned her parents, her father showed her a portrait of her Sicilian great-grandfather, whose darker skin seemingly provided an explanation for her own. Schwartz, like everyone around her, bought this story…
Read the entire article here.