White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness Book

An incisive debunking of our myths and false assumptions about race. Maurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York in the sixties. His father was a prototypical Jewish liberal, 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 all its meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and often startling book. In it, Berger juxtaposes a series of brilliant short takes about race with a memoir about his boyhood. He recalls his teenage "cultural" crushes on Aretha Franklin and Angela Davis. He listens to blacks telling of awkward racial incidents--being tailed by security guards in department stores, for instance. He acerbically reviews a Polo ad campaign that makes a black model seem to be, literally, a clotheshorse. He revealingly pairs comments on race from the works of Roland Barthes and Toni Morrison, Studs Terkel and James Baldwin. To all of this Berger responds with his own wry, energetic, penetrating sensibility. White Lies is a powerful and deeply affecting look at race in America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.Read More