Mixed Race Studies

A Profound Documentary, Little White Lie Follows a Woman’s Search for Her Identify

The Village Voice
New York, New York
2014-11-26

Diana Clarke

In Woodstock, New York, at the end of the 20th century, Lacey Schwartz was raised in an affluent Jewish household where something was slightly off. Darker-skinned than her mother and father, Schwartz fielded probing questions about her race from a young age, but refused to entertain the possibility that she was not the biological offspring of her two white parents. When Lacey was in high school, her parents’ marriage collapsed, and so did the veneer of her identity. Schwartz’s subsequent investigation resulted in this profound and engaging documentary…

Read the entire review here.

Going to College and Learning You’re Black: The Moving Story of Little White Lie

Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood
2014-11-25

Chase Quinn

“You boys are black, and don’t you forget that.”

From an early age I was taught that both my black identity and my white-Irish identity were important, and that I was never to relinquish either from my understanding of who I was. Watching Lacey Schwartz’s thought-provoking documentary Little White Lie— now in limited release and airing on PBS March 23—I was reminded of this formative experience, the wisdom of these seemingly competing messages and the diverse range of biracial narratives out there.

Little White Lie traces the story of Schwartz’s discovery of her mixed-race heritage after 18 years believing she was the product of two white, Jewish parents. After submitting a photo of herself with her undergraduate application to Georgetown and being contacted by their black student alliance, she begins to question the story she’s been told about who she is and that of her parents’ picture-perfect marriage. Ultimately she’s forced to confront her mother about a secret affair with Schwartz’s biological father, a black man and longtime family friend, and reexamine who she is as person…

Read the entire review here.

Movie “Little White Lie” Creator Lacey Schwartz Talks Not Knowing She Was Black [VIDEO]

Ebro in the Morning
HOT 97, WQHT 97.1 FM
New York, New York
2014-11-26

Ebro Darden, Co-Host

Peter Rosenberg, Co-Host

Laura Stylez, Co-Host

Could you imagine living your entire life not knowing your true ethnic background? Movie director Lacey Schwartz can. Watch her talk about her new film “Little White Lie” and more:

[00:07:02] Ebro Darden: I existed in a world where I didn’t really… my mother’s mother had passed… when she was young. My mother’s father didn’t acknowledge me at all. Um, and even to this day, my mother likes to debate it as if he didn’t acknowledge me for some other reason other than race…

Lacey Schwartz: Hmm. Hmm.

Darden: When it was really race. When it was straight-up the fact that she had a son who was half-black.

Schwartz: Yeah.

Darden: Some of her step-siblings were cordial, but it wasn’t like a full embrace. So I got embraced mostly by my father’s side of the family…

Schwartz: Hmm. Hmm.

Darden: That’s how I was raised. That was the culture I was around. Which obviously plays itself out now… Um, in some ways because I consider myself black. I’m mixed-race, but I consider myself black. There are mixed-race individuals though, who consider themselves mixed, other, whatever, blah, blah, blah…

Schwartz: Yeah.

Darden: But I did just hear you say that you consider yourself “black.”

Schwartz: I do. I consider myself black. I consider myself biracial too. But for me—I’m not trying to define it for other people—because as you just said, other people feel differently. But, I look at being biracial as a category of being black.

Darden: And why is that?

Schwartz: You know, I think it really comes down to feeling like a person of color… like “other.” You know, and this ideal that whiteness so much is not really embraced or fully identified in this country, you know it is almost looked at as a neutral. And I don’t feel neutral. You know so, do I think that there’re elements of me that is connected to the fact that I grew up white. And I do think that I have a unique experience. That I grew up white and I do know what it is to be black, I identify as black…

A Secret Falls From the Family Tree, and a Girl’s Identity Branches Out

The New York Times
2014-11-23

Ben Kenigsberg, Film Critic

‘Little White Lie,’ a Personal Documentary About Race

The documentary “Little White Lie” would be provocative simply for what it says about race and identity. The director Lacey Schwartz grew up Jewish in Woodstock, N.Y., yet something seemed off. Her peers would ask if she was adopted. At Ms. Schwartz’s bat mitzvah, a member of her synagogue assumed she was an Ethiopian Jew. Her family attributed her darker skin to a Sicilian great-grandfather. Only gradually did Ms. Schwartz, now 37, begin to suspect what might seem obvious to an outsider: that her biological father was black.

“Little White Lie” is, in part, the story of Ms. Schwartz’s evolving view of her background. As a child, she thought of herself as white and even wished for a lighter complexion. College changed that: Although she didn’t declare a race on her application, she says Georgetown considered her a black student based on a photograph. She was welcomed by the Black Student Alliance and began to experience the influence that race has on everyday life.

That shift in perspective might be startling enough, but the movie goes one step further by charting the effect that Ms. Schwartz’s transformation has on her family members and the awkward sense in which her embrace of a biracial identity might be seen as a repudiation of them. The film is a searing portrait of collective denial — a diagnosis from which Ms. Schwartz doesn’t exempt herself…

Read the entire review here.

How a biracial woman grew up thinking she was white

Vox
2014-11-19

Jenée Desmond-Harris

When Lacey Schwartz was accepted to Georgetown University, the school saw her photo and passed her name along to the black student association. The organization contacted her.

The only issue: Schwartz had grown up in a Jewish household in Woodstock New York, and had always — despite occasional questions about the source of her brown skin and curly hair — identified as white…

…Schwartz, who told Vox she now identifies as “black/biracial,” explaining, “I look at bi-racial as a category of being black,” said Little White Lie’s message is about more than just race…

Read the entire article here.

To Tell the Truth: Alumna’s new film about family secrets to show at Boston film festival (video)

Harvard Law Today
Alumni Focus
2014-11-12

Lewis Rice

Lacey Schwartz ’03 will return to Cambridge this weekend to speak about her new documentary “Little White Lie,” showing Saturday Nov. 15 and 17 as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival. The film traces her personal story of being raised as a white Jewish girl in Woodstock, N.Y., only to find out as a young adult that her biological father was an African-American man with whom her mother had an affair (a family friend who died nearly ten years ago). In an interview with Harvard Law Today, she spoke about family secrets, the universal appeal of her story, and the power of film to reveal truths—including at Harvard Law School…

Read the entire interview here.

Little White Lie at DOC NYC

DOC NYC
2014-11-13 through 2014-11-20
New York, New York

Showtimes

IFC Center
323 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10014
(212) 924-7771

Sunday, 2014-11-16, 19:00 EST (Local Time)
Wednesday, 2014-11-19, 10:45 EST (Local Time)

Official Site: http://www.littlewhiteliethefilm.com
Producer: Lacey Schwartz, Mehret Mandefro
Cinematographer: James Adolphus
Editor: Toby Shimin, Erik Dugger
Music: Kathryn Bostic
Running Time: 66
Language: Englsih
Country: USA

Growing up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household, Lacey Schwartz knew she looked different from the rest of her family, but her darker complexion and curly hair were brushed off as traits inherited from her Sicilian grandfather. When she finally begins to dig deeper, Lacey uncovers unspoken family secrets and willful denial that cuts to the core of her very sense of self, inspiring an intriguing re-evaluation and redefinition of identity.

Filmmaker is expected to be in person for both screenings.

For more information, click here.

Filmmaker in Focus: Lacey Schwartz

Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival 2014
2014-09-11

Aurora Herrera

Throughout history and for various reasons, many people who are not white have passed for white. But how many people have passed without knowing they were doing so?

That is precisely what the documentary Little White Lie, a deeply personal film by Lacey Schwartz, is about. It is also a film about family secrets, deception, denial and a courageous search for identity.

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a Jewish family in upstate New York, and always believed that she was white. She was told that her relatively dark skin and curly hair were the result of a certain Sicilian ancestor. As a young woman, however, she began ask deeper questions about her identity and talk about matters of race and identity.

The CEO of the production company Truth Aid, Lacey is a director/producer who has worked with a variety of production companies and networks, including MTV and BET. Little White Lie (2014) is the first film that Lacey has directed. She also executive produced the narrative film Difret (2014, and also a selection of ttff/14), which won audience awards at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. Lacey has a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Lacey will bet at the ttff/14 for the screenings of her film on 17 and 19 September. Ahead of the screenings, Festival blogger Aurora Herrera discussed the film with her and heard first-hand about her journey to finding out who she is, and about her need to redefine her identity.

Aurora Herrera: Tell me about the title of the film. Usually a little white lie is something that doesn’t hurt anybody. However, this lie hurt many people.

Lacey Schwartz: The title is meant to be ironic in the sense that people can use the term little white lie to describe things that are harmless and to spare everybody pain, but in fact part of the point is that these little white lies can actually build up and affect people a lot. The lies can pile upon each other. Also, there is kind of a double entendre in the sense that it implies that I am the little white lie so there is also a racial connotation to it, like when something is white it’s considered good and when something is black it’s considered bad…

Read the entire interview here.

Documentary reveals Jewish mother’s ‘Little White Lie’

The Times of Israel
2014-08-17

Rebecca Spence

Lacey Schwartz’s film about reconciling her hidden black paternity to the Ashkenazi Jewish home she was raised in strikes universal themes

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — When Lacey Schwartz celebrated her bat mitzvah more than two decades ago in her hometown of Woodstock, New York, a synagogue-goer turned to her and said, “It’s so nice to have an Ethiopian Jew in our midst.”

Never mind that Schwartz, a striking 37-year-old with long black curls and a megawatt smile, is about as American as they come. Raised by two Ashkenazi Jewish parents in a largely white, upstate New York town, Schwartz’s complexion — darker than that of her relatives — had long been attributed to a Sicilian grandfather.

Despite lingering questions, she believed the story. But when Schwartz enrolled at Georgetown University and the Black Student Alliance sent her a welcome letter based on a picture she submitted, Schwartz could no longer deny something was amiss.

She confronted her mother, Peggy Schwartz, only to discover that her biological father was a black man named Rodney with whom she had had an affair.

The discovery of her family secret and Schwartz’s coming to terms with her newly complex racial identity serves as the basis for “Little White Lie,” a moving documentary that had its official world premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last Sunday following screenings in Cape Cod, Mass., and Philadelphia…

…While Schwartz the filmmaker has embraced her black identity, it has not been at the expense of the strong Jewish cultural identity she developed during her formative years. Some of the earliest stirrings of the film came through her work with Reboot, a hand-picked collective of Jewish creative professionals who come together to explore meaning, community and identity…

Read the entire article here.

A summer camp where Jews of color go to ‘feel normal’

The Times of Israel
2014-08-20

Rebecca Spence

With an emphasis on diverse Diaspora Judaism, Camp Be’chol Lashon has a markedly different mandate than most Jewish camps

PETALUMA, Calif. (JTA) — On a cool Sunday evening, Jewish campers with nervous smiles took to the stage one by one to perform poems they had composed on the theme of identity.

One girl riffed on being taunted for having “fuzzy eyebrows” and “bushy hair.” Another rhymed about being told “You don’t look Jewish” too many times to count.

If this doesn’t sound like your typical summer camp fare, it’s because Camp Be’chol Lashon has a markedly different mandate than most Jewish camps.

Nestled in the misty hills of Marin County, the northern California camp is the country’s only Jewish sleepaway camp geared to Jews of color.

“Part of the goal is to make these kids feel normal in a Jewish context,” said Diane Tobin, the founder and executive director of the camp’s parent organization, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Be’chol Lashon, which promotes racial, ethnic and cultural diversity in Jewish life…

…The camp is not just for Jews of color, as evinced by one white camper’s poem about her identity as a “nerdy Jewish girl.” It’s also very much a family affair. Tobin’s son, Jonah, is a junior counselor and her daughter, Sarah Spencer, serves as the camp’s co-director.

“The kids all come with very different stories about who they are and where they’ve come to be,” said Spencer, 38, a marriage and family therapist who is also the mother of two biracial children. “Here they get to practice explaining who they are to one another and we help them to feel good about whatever that is.”

Savannah Henry, a 21-year-old counselor whose father is African-American, said that before her rabbi at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, Calif., told her about Be’chol Lashon, she had spent a miserable summer at a more mainstream Jewish camp…

Read the entire article here.