Mixed Race Studies

Jewish girl overcomes a ‘Little White Lie’ about race

The Kansas City Star
Kansas City, Missouri
2015-01-05

Jeneé Osterheldt

When I look at one of her old baby pictures, I think of my own childhood snapshots.

A mixed little girl sits happily in her white mama’s lap. It’s a sweet picture of Lacey Schwartz and her mother. But unlike me, she didn’t know her true heritage until she was grown. Ironically, her last name means black in German and Yiddish, but Lacey grew up white.

Her caramel-latte brown skin and dark, curly hair stood out in her loving, upper-middle-class Jewish household in mostly white Woodstock, N.Y. The family had an explanation for that: Lacey looked like her father’s Sicilian grandfather.

But deep down, she always wondered…

…“I lived over a decade in a racial closet,” Lacey says. “Learning the truth was a relief that led to this larger search on how to integrate my two identities. I personally identify as biracial. But I look at that as a category of being black with the understanding that other biracial people may not feel that way.”…

Read the entire article here.

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…

Read the entire article here.

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.

What if you were told you were white

All In with Chris Hayes
MSNBC
2014-10-02

Chris Hayes, Host

Lacey Schwartz, Filmaker
“Little White Lie”

But it turns out you’re not. Chris Hayes talks to filmmaker Lacey Schwartz about growing up believing she was white, when in fact, she’s not.

Watch the video here.