"Finding Your Roots" on PBS

[tishaLA]

2. Have you seen the film "Little White Lie"?

It's a documentary that's aired on PBS and is/was available on Netflix. It's quite good.

It's directly by and stars Lacey Schwartz who grows up in Woodstock NY in a pretty normal middle class Jewish home. She has always had darker skin than her parents, but they explain it away as her resembling her Sicilian paternal grandfather. At her bat mitzvah, a woman tells her how nice it is to have an Ethiopian Jew in the congregation; she has a biracial boyfriend in HS and everyone thinks they are brother and sister. Then, she applies to Georgetown and has to send in a photo of herself as part of the application package (a practice I thought ended long, long ago) and based on the picture, she receives a greeting from the Black Students Alliance. So, when she went to Georgetown, she "becomes" black; as she says in the documentary, her "dark skin" suddenly became light skin and her "unruly hair" suddenly becomes good hair.

At any rate, she eventually discovers that she is the result of a long-term affair between her mother and an African American guy she met when she worked in the parks department in NYC, something her father sensed but never quite admitted to himself. But the film is interesting because it explores how we construct race in the US--how much is what we see, how much is cultural, and how much is biological. (when I first saw it on PBS, I texted a <Jewish> friend and said, "Have you heard about a film called Little White Lie? It's about a woman with the impossibly perfect name 'Lacey Schwartz'"--because Schwartz literally means black and lace simultaneously permits and prevents seeing through it)