{"id":38489,"date":"2014-11-25T16:48:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T16:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38489"},"modified":"2014-11-25T22:05:08","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T22:05:08","slug":"a-secret-falls-from-the-family-tree-and-a-girls-identity-branches-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38489","title":{"rendered":"A Secret Falls From the Family Tree, and a Girl\u2019s Identity Branches Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/24\/movies\/little-white-lie-a-personal-documentary-about-race.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>A Secret Falls From the Family Tree, and a Girl\u2019s Identity Branches Out<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2014-11-23<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/benkenigsberg\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Ben Kenigsberg<\/strong><\/a>, Film Critic<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2018Little White Lie,\u2019 a Personal Documentary About Race<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The documentary \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.littlewhiteliethefilm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Little White Lie<\/a>\u201d would be provocative simply for what it says about race and identity. The director Lacey Schwartz grew up Jewish in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Woodstock,_New_York\" target=\"_blank\">Woodstock, N.Y.<\/a>, yet something seemed off. Her peers would ask if she was adopted. At Ms. Schwartz\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bar_and_Bat_Mitzvah\" target=\"_blank\">bat mitzvah<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLittle White Lie\u201d is, in part, the story of Ms. Schwartz\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>That shift in perspective might be startling enough, but the movie goes one step further by charting the effect that Ms. Schwartz\u2019s 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 \u2014 a diagnosis from which Ms. Schwartz doesn\u2019t exempt herself&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire review\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/24\/movies\/little-white-lie-a-personal-documentary-about-race.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Secret Falls From the Family Tree, and a Girl\u2019s Identity Branches Out The New York Times 2014-11-23 Ben Kenigsberg, Film Critic \u2018Little White Lie,\u2019 a Personal Documentary About Race The documentary \u201cLittle White Lie\u201d would be provocative simply for what it says about race and identity. The director Lacey Schwartz grew up Jewish in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,3601,8,820,20],"tags":[18504,3602,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-38489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-usa","tag-ben-kenigsberg","tag-lacey-schwartz","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}