White Lies
Race and the Myths of Whiteness
by Maurice Berger
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 0-374-28949-2;
$23.00US; Jan. 99
Maurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged
environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who
worshipped Martin Luther King Jr., his mother a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew who hated black
people. Berger himself was one of the few white kids in his Lower East Side housing
project.
Berger's unusual experience--and his determination to search the subject
of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh
and startling book. In it, Berger juxtaposes a series of brilliant short takes about the
politics of race with personal and often disturbing vignettes about his own racial
coming-of-age. These, in turn, are amplified by other voices and points of view: the words
of ordinary people coping with fears and anxieties about race, and passages deftly drawn
from the work of James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison, and other writers.
Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out
the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White
Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling
opinions about race. The result is an uncommonly honest and affecting look at race in
America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.
"Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind when he tried to kickstart a
national discussion on race. . . . Berger deserves credit—and readers—for coming
up with an idiosyncratic way to think publicly about the vexing problems of race and
racism." --Publisher's Weekly
"We know far too little about the origins of passionate antiracism among whites,
and Berger’s frank autobiographical sections provide soaring insights. . . . White
Lies brilliantly charts the decidedly nonlinear process through which intellectual
work and everyday life taught him that the inhumanity involved in embracing the[e]
privileges [of race] carries too high a cost." --David Roediger, The Village
Voice
"The measure of a good book is in how far it chases readers somewhere new. . . .
Using poignant autobiographical reflections, recent media events, and comments from other
writers, artists, and researchers, Berger intrudes [into] the silent, racist mentality of
"whiteness." White Lies is an equal opportunity for everyone to examine
how the paradigm of racism limits personal thought and freedom." --Bill Curtis, THE
AFRO-AMERICAN
"This book will shame and excite the many, many readers it deserves. Rarely has
the thorny issue of race—of white error, white duplicity—been so personally,
explicitly, and constructively addressed. Maurice Berger has composed his meditations with
artfulness and grace." --Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Jackie Under My Skin
"Berger was born to write this book. He peppers his short, perceptive chapters
with sound bites, sampling just about everyone—from James Baldwin to anonymous
e-mailers—who has ever thought about whiteness and blackness. . . . Both
racism’s victory and defeat exist, for Berger, in everyday actions and utterances; it
must be battled in its myriad details, rather than its overwhelming vastness."
--Bethany Schneider, Out
"In this moving, disturbing, and valuable book, one is reminded that race is also
a . . . matter of representation-—that their are compositional elements to be
considered, a vocabulary of symbols designed to please or play with the emotions or jar
one into edginess. White Lies is one of the most insightful volumes in the effort
to untangle this complicated national legacy." --Patricia J. Williams, author of Seeing
a Color-Blind Future
Author
Maurice Berger grew up in the Bernard Baruch Houses, a public housing project in
New York City. He is a Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the
New School for Social Research. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book: White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
by Maurice Berger
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 0-374-28949-2; $23.00US; Jan. 99
Copyright © 1999 Maurice Berger
PROLOGUE
(April 4, 1968)
Moments after a television news bulletin announced that Martin Luther
King, Jr., was dead, my mother said he deserved to die. She rose up from the green sofa in
the living room of our low-income apartment in the Lower East Side projects and began
venting her grievances about the civil rights leader: He was a troublemaker. He was
selfish and self-serving. He was poisoning the country. He was ungrateful to those brave
and foolish white people who stood by his side in the civil rights movement. He was giving
all the bigots in the South a reason to hate the good schwartzes, and the
Jews, and anyone else who was not like them.
The things my mother said about Dr. King were not inconsistent with some
of the other things she tried to teach my sister and me: that only light-skinned blacks
were worthy of our attention and respect; that black people "smell like baked
beans"; that black people were generally not as smart as white people; and that we
should refer to black people as schwartzes, the Yiddish equivalent of
"niggers." (Sometimes she would outsmart unsuspecting schwartzes by
reverting to a secret code, known only to her and her children: she would instruct us to
use the word weisse, or "whitey," whenever a black person was
around, so that he would not know that we were talking about him.)
Confused and frightened by her tirade that night, I excused myself. As I
walked down the hall to the bedroom I shared with my sister, I heard my father sobbing. He
never watched TV with us; he would usually retreat to his bedroom after dinner, read the
newspaper--The New York Times for the hard news, the Post for its
liberal commentary--and listen to the radio. The door to his room was open; I walked in
without knocking. He was crying so hard he was unable to speak. His behavior frightened me
even more than my mother's. I was nearly twelve years old, and I had never seen my father
cry. Tears rolled down his face as his finger pointed to the radio, which blared updates
on the assassination. "What a nightmare," he finally muttered. I lay down next
to him, put my head on his chest, and remained there for the rest of the evening.
MOTHER
More than anything, my mother's life was shaped by her otherness: the
darkness of her skin, eyes, and hair; her Sephardic heritage; her Hispanic-sounding maiden
name. More than once she had been called a spic. More than once she had been called a
kike, a hebe, a Jew bastard. More than once she had lost a job because a producer or
casting director thought she was "too dark" or "too Jewish." My mother
was the embodiment of the mutability of race, the evidence that terms like
"black" and "white" are imprecise at best, living proof that
miscegenation has blurred the racial boundaries of almost every one of us, confirmation
that race itself is socially and culturally constructed.
In nineteenth-century America the law in many states would have
qualified people lighter-skinned than my mother as black because of the traces of African
blood that coursed through their veins. But by the 1920s my dark, small grandfather could
slip past rigid quotas and through U S. immigration as white on the basis of his word and
the implied promise that he would strive to meet the immigrant ideal of an all-American
whiteness.
My mother's earliest memories were shaped in an environment of prejudice
and fear. She was born in Germany in 1920. Her father, Norbert Secunda, a research
assistant in the mathematics department of the University of Hamburg, had confronted the
usual bigotry known to Jews in Germany in the years before the rise of National Socialism.
His projects at the university were often ignored or stripped of funding. The ranking
members of his department, who, in polite conversation, would frequently refer to the fact
that he was Jewish, encouraged him to find work elsewhere. Fearing that he would not
survive this situation, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1927,
leaving behind a steady income and most of his worldly possessions. His fears were
prescient. By the end of World War II, nearly every member of both his and his wife's
families--scores of men, women, and children--had been killed by the Nazis.
Living in New York with her mother (her parents divorced soon after they
immigrated), my mother decided to pursue a career as a singer. The prejudice she
encountered played a significant role in undermining her professional life and destroying
her morale. While she gave recitals at the Metropolitan Opera House, the old Brooklyn
Paramount, and other venues in the late 1930s and early 1940s, her revered voice teacher,
a retired soprano assigned through one of the programs of the Works Progress
Administration, was a destructive bigot and Jew hater. She continually warned my mother
that if she did not convert to Roman Catholicism and capitalize on the "Spanish good
looks" that would easily allow her to pass for Gentile, she would never make it in
the professional opera world. My mother, an Orthodox Jew, would not even consider the
idea. The teacher, initially one of my mother's greatest supporters, retaliated by
relentlessly assigning Christian hymns (which my mother refused to sing), cutting back on
her participation in student recitals, and refusing to write letters of reference or
recommend her to agents and producers.
My mother's dark, ethnic looks frequently prevented her from getting
roles, even bit parts, in the small theater companies she turned to after her opera career
stalled in the 1940s. She changed her name to the all-American, professional-sounding
Karen Grant after a number of agents and producers warned her that her given name, Ruth
Secunda, sounded too exotic, too Spanish, too Jewish. (The name Secunda had achieved
national prominence in the late 1930s after the Yiddish song "Bei Mir Bist du
Schön," written by a relative of my mother, Sholom Secunda, became a hit for the
Andrews Sisters.) After a brief stint in Miami in the late 1940s--where daily trips to the
beach rendered her an even deeper shade of brown, leading producers to typecast her for
roles in Latin nightclub revues--she returned to New York and took up work as a lingerie
salesgirl. The only parts she could get were in the small Yiddish theater companies that
still dotted Manhattan's Lower East Side.
My mother's career ended when she met and married my father in 1954.
Broke and living on the Lower East Side with her obsessive, overbearing stage mother, she
saw my father as a way out of her failed life. Listening to her scratchy old 78 rpm
demonstration records years later, I realized that her voice--an amalgam of coloratura
grace, overwrought emotion, and quivery vibrato--probably would not have made her a star.
But I have never doubted that racism and anti-Semitism helped to undermine her self-image
and her will. She would never forgive the bigots who she believed thwarted her
professional life and forced her to trade a future on the stage for a life of poverty and
hardship. Even on her deathbed, she found a way of blaming her terminal illness on
prejudice. Medical researchers had long suspected that cancer was caused by repressed
rage, she told me, and an early death was the price she was paying for years of buried
anger against the Jew haters who had destroyed her life.
POWDER
From the time I was a little boy, I kept Mother company as she made
herself up in the morning. She felt comfortable letting me in on this feminine ritual. Her
half-hour-long "beauty regimen" as she called it, was fascinating and, as she
whipped out an assortment of vials and brushes, theatrical. She fixed herself
rigidly before the mirror and began. First, she would brush her jet-black hair,
applying gobs of foul-smelling, viscous pomades in an effort to relax her tight, kinky
curls into gentle waves. She would apply Lancôme or Shiseido moisturizer to her skin,
followed by concealer under her eyes and on freckles and moles, liquid foundation many
shades lighter than her olive complexion, and a dusting of chalky face powder. She would
draw on her lips with pencil and fill in the outline with bright-red lipstick. Finally,
she would spray her neck and hair liberally with perfume, favoring heavy, intoxicating
fragrances like Tabu and Fiji. She would turn away from the mirror and face me only after
her makeup was in place and her hair was properly coiffed. I would tell her how beautiful
she looked. Then, and only then, was she able to show herself to the rest of the world.
POWER
Kerry Michaels, a writer and television producer tells, this story:
It was 1985, and I was going to travel around Kenya by myself before
visiting my brother, who was working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Malawi. I
had only a vague idea of what I was going to do in Kenya. Having traveled all night, I
arrived, exhausted and a little nervous, at the Nairobi airport at about five in the
morning.
The terminal was a big, square hall--very austere, very
official-looking. I glanced up. There was a balcony that ran all around the room. Standing
on this balcony at perfect intervals were the blackest men I had ever seen in my life.
They wore olive-drab uniforms and crimson berets. They all held rifles across their
chests. They made an incredibly powerful, aesthetically stunning image: regal posture,
beautiful, chiseled black faces, caps all cocked at the same angle.
I know this might sound stupid, but as I, a white American woman in my
late twenties, looked around the airport, I realized that the power structure was black.
The customs officials were black. The security officials examining my passport were black.
Everyone who controlled my fate was black. It occurred to me what it was truly like to be
a minority (albeit, when you are white in Africa, an empowered minority). In New York, if
you're the only white person on the subway, you're still not a minority, because the power
structure around you is white. In the Nairobi airport, I realized how different it was to
have the power reside in a different race. It was the black men who were holding the guns.
The government they served was black. The idea that the whole country was being run by
black people was absolutely alien to me. To be white and find myself situated at the
bottom of this massive hall, with these black men standing with guns over my head, really
gave me a sense of what this inversion of power feels like. Why had I never realized this
before? You think that as a white liberal you get it. But you don't.
SMILE
As a child, I wasn't sure what to make of my mother's view of
black people. I tended to excuse her ideas as embarrassing quirks, as odd miscalculations
of a world I experienced differently and daily, a world of black neighbors, black
classmates, black teachers. It was precisely this world that my mother struggled to
transcend. She found remarkable ways to keep clear of black people. She would avoid
looking at the people she did not want to see. She would make small talk with people she
did not want to hear. She would change the subject from the things she did not want to
think about. (Her two "friends" in the projects both lived on our floor: an
elderly Jewish widow, Mrs. Schwartz, and a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman, Mrs.
Salgada--the kind of Hispanic person my mother would refer to as "white
Spanish." Neither woman was ever invited into our apartment.) My mother was
the strange lady with the brightly colored dresses who politely nodded hello, averted her
eyes, and kept walking. Her lips would curl up into a false, inscrutable smile. No one
would ever know the contempt she felt for them. Or so she believed.
Purchase a copy of White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
Copyright © 1999 Maurice Berger and The Multiracial Activist
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