Mixed Race Studies

Meet the black woman raised to believe she was white

The Telegraph
2015-07-12

Jane Mulkerrins

Schwartz believes that racial identity is “fluid and contextual” Photo: Nicholas Calcott

Growing up, Lacey Schwartz always felt different. It wasn’t until her late teens that she discovered the truth about her parentage – and her race

“Throughout my life, people have asked me why I look the way I do,” says Lacey Schwartz. “I would tell them that my parents were white, which was true. I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. I grew up being told, and believing, that I was the nice, white, Jewish daughter of two nice, white, Jewish parents.”

But Schwartz, a 38-year-old film-maker, has brown skin, curly hair and full lips. It was only when she was 18 that her mother admitted the truth: that she had had an affair with a friend and former colleague who was black. And that, in all likelihood, he was Lacey’s biological father.

The revelation not only shook her relationship with her mother to the core, but also led Schwartz to question everything she had believed about who she was, and eventually inspired her to make a documentary about the experience, called Little White Lie.

“I started out wanting to make a film about being black and Jewish, because I was really struggling with my dual identity,” she says. “But I was living in a racial closet at the time that was all about my family secret. So I decided to use the film as a way to fully uncover the secret.”…

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Misty Copeland: meet the ballerina who rewrote the rules of colour, class and curves

The Telegraph
2015-06-21

Jane Mulkerrins

Facing opposition about her race, shape, even her hair, the ballet dancer Misty Copeland battled the establishment – and her own mother – to make it to the top

Misty Copeland can pinpoint the precise moment when she realised her success in ballet held a broader significance. “It was the night I danced The Firebird at the Metropolitan Opera House in June 2012. I had never seen an audience that was 50 per cent African-American. It was overwhelming to know that so many of them were there to support what I stood for.”

As only the third black soloist (one rung down from a principal dancer, or prima ballerina) in the history of New York’s prestigious American Ballet Theatre (ABT) – and the first in two decades – Copeland, 32, is elegantly dismantling the barriers of race and class that have long surrounded the art form. “When I talk to [black] families, they tell me, ‘We never went to the ballet before. Why would we bring our children when they can’t see themselves reflected on the stage?’ ” she says.

Her profile reaches beyond the rarefied realms of ballet: she has performed with Prince on stage, her recent advert for the sportswear brand Under Armour has had eight million views, and she has been namechecked as an inspiration by both Barack Obama and Beyoncé.

In April, she was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and was one of the five cover stars for the issue, along with Bradley Cooper, Kanye West, the US news anchor Jorge Ramos and the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. That month, she sparked huge media coverage – and a frenzied rush on the box office – when she and Brooklyn Mack became the first black duo to dance the leading roles of Odil/Odette and Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake for a major ballet company.

But Copeland’s prominence and influence is all the more incredible given her wholly untraditional path to the top. As she recounts in her bestselling autobiography, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, which is now being developed into a Hollywood film, she did not begin lessons until the age of 13 – positively geriatric in the dance world…

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