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Overview
The acclaimed work that debunks our myths and false assumptions about race in America
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 worshiped 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 examine the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book.
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429932899 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2000 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 316 KB |
About the 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.
Read an Excerpt
White Lies
Race and the Myths of Whiteness
By Maurice Berger
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1999 Maurice BergerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3289-9
CHAPTER 1
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.
CHAPTER 2WHITE
In May 1996, Nightline aired a weeklong series, "America in Black and White," on racial division in the United States. The first two episodes dealt with an incident that had occurred months earlier in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia. Eight hours after an African American woman, Bridget Ward, moved into the white, working-class neighborhood with her two daughters, her home was vandalized. Racial epithets, including "Die Nigger Die" and "Leave Nigger Now," were scrawled on her front steps and ketchup was splattered to simulate blood. Although some white neighbors went to Ward's house to apologize and welcome her to the community, others were featured on local and national TV news programs spewing racist venom: "It's against the law, but if they get them out, that's fine" ... "Bluebirds don't mix with robins" ... "She should have expected trouble. Nobody wants mixed people in their neighborhood." Ward was given twenty-four-hour police protection and a police escort for her children. Two weeks later, she received an anonymous letter threatening violent damage to her house. Disgusted and fearing for her family's safety, she decided to move out of Bridesburg. "I don't need all these hateful people around me," she concluded.
Nightline followed up its report on this incident with a mini town meeting in which a small group of the neighborhood's white residents answered questions posed by the show's host, Ted Koppel. Respondents, at times, seemed tentative and unsure of their feelings. One woman felt at once ashamed and afraid of her racist neighbors and apprehensive about the possibility that black people might bring crime to the neighborhood. The group, however, could not agree on how much racism there was in Bridesburg. One man, responding to another's claim that Bridesburg was home to "many people of color," reminded his neighbors that the community of six thousand had only a handful of black residents. When another man declared that the "thing we want in this neighborhood is good people" without regard to their race, one woman snickered in disbelief. One man snapped back that race was the issue for most residents. "Why lie about it?" he asked.
The anxiety that many in the group appeared to share was that integration might endanger the integrity and future of Bridesburg. As Ted Koppel summed it up: "I've heard fears expressed ... that what you are concerned about is ... that the community you've established, the safety you've established, the property values you've established could in some way be damaged if African American families were to start moving in ... You've cited other communities in the Philadelphia area where you say that has happened and it has caused the whole community to go downhill."
On the second night's broadcast, Koppel ventured deeper into the race question. If blackness could depreciate the value of their community, he asked, was their own whiteness, conversely, in some way valuable? Starting from the premise that skin color is not something white people dwell on in the United States, Koppel wondered if whites just don't understand the difference between living one's life free of racial prejudice and constantly dodging the bullets, both large and small, of racism. A Nightline poll confirmed this suspicion: while 75 percent of black respondents agreed with the statement that "blacks and other minorities [were] discriminated against in housing," only 44 percent of whites held this view.
To shift the attention of the group toward a more self-conscious assessment of their own racial attitudes, Koppel asked a question that was a variation on a classroom exercise designed by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker more than twenty years earlier. Hacker proposed a hypothetical situation to his white students: It is now the future, and you find out that a government agency and not genetics determined your race and the race of every baby born in the United States over the past number of years. One morning, a representative of this government agency responsible for determining race comes to your house to inform you that you were born the wrong color and within hours would be involuntarily returned to your proper race. The government has set aside some money, he tells you, that it offers as grants to help people in your situation adjust to your new racial status. How much economic compensation, Hacker asked, would you seek if you were changed from white to black? "How much do you want?" Koppel asked his group of white respondents. "How much would it take?"
With this provocative question, the group's understanding of the power relationships of race seemed to shift. People who moments earlier had denied that racism was a problem in Bridesburg now were willing to concede that being black in America might be more difficult than being white. "I would take $50 million, then I could live anywhere. I wouldn't have to deal with any racism," remarked one man. "I'd rather be white," interjected another. "It's easier. I admit that it's easier to be white. I admit that blacks got a bad hand dealt to them." In this role-playing exercise, while most respondents insisted that it was not being black, per se, but the government's mistake and the problems associated with adjusting to a new race that merited them lavish compensation, each clearly saw his or her whiteness as an advantage.
CHAPTER 3POWDER
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.
CHAPTER 4POWER
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.
CHAPTER 5SMILE
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. Salgado — 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.
CHAPTER 6PROBLEM
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town ... Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these, I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
[Liberals] relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at "the problems" [of black people]; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them thefreedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the "problems" on black people themselves — and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention ... [F]or liberals, black people are to be "included" and "integrated" in "our" society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be "well-behaved" and "worthy of acceptance" by "our" way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitute elements of that life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from White Lies by Maurice Berger. Copyright © 1999 Maurice Berger. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,PROLOGUE - (April 4, 1968),
MOTHER,
WHITE,
POWDER,
POWER,
SMILE,
PROBLEM,
NEGRO LOVER,
BEAUTY,
SILENCE,
DELUSION,
TRASH,
WHITE (2),
RAGE,
MENTOR,
HAIR,
CLASS,
GAMES,
SEGREGATION,
FATHER,
INTEGRATION,
JEW,
RACE,
HAIR (2),
TRUST,
CAUGHT,
CAIN,
ARTIFACT,
MIRROR,
CLASS (2),
MYTH,
HYPE,
PASSING,
PASSING (2),
PROJECTION,
ARETHA,
MEMORY,
BOTHER,
SKIN,
I Q,
INITIATION,
NURSE,
ENVY,
PINK,
AFFIRMATIVE,
FINALE,
HAIR (3),
MIRROR (2),
COLOR-BLIND,
ARTIFACT (2),
CORNERED,
WHITE (3),
THEM,
KNOWING,
DIALOGUE,
TREASON,
DENIAL,
FEAR,
BISCUITS,
HOTELS,
WORDS,
POLITESSE,
FIRE,
WHITENESS,
KIDS,
WALKING,
EPILOGUE - (April 4, 1998),
MAURICE BERGER - WHITE LIES,
Praise for WHITE LIES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
Notes,
Copyright Page,
What People are Saying About This
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.
With all of the national emphasis on a dialogue about race, one is tempted to think that race is only a matter of words. In this moving, disturbing, and valuable book, one is reminded that race is also an aesthetic entrenchment, a matter of representation.