Mixed Race Studies

Little White Lie

OTB Productions LLC
2013
66 minutes

Lacey Schwartz, Producer/Director

Mehret Mandefro, Producer

James Adolphus, Co-Director

What defines our identity, our family of origin or the family that raises us? How do we come to terms with the sins and mistakes of our parents? Lacey discovers that answering those questions means understanding her parents’ own stories as well as her own. She pieces together her family history and the story of her dual identity using home videos, archival footage, interviews, and episodes from her own life. Little White Lie is a personal documentary about the legacy of family secrets, denial, and redemption.

Little White Lie tells Lacey Schwartz’s story of growing up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity — despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family’s explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different.

At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair. Afraid of losing her relationship with her parents, Lacey doesn’t openly acknowledge her newly discovered black identity with her white family. When her biological father dies shortly before Lacey’s 30th birthday, the family secret can stay hidden no longer. Following the funeral, Lacey begins a quest to reconcile the hidden pieces of her life and heal her relationship with the only father she ever knew.

Little White Lie, formerly called Outside the Box, is a feature documentary produced by Truth Aid in association with ITVS. The film will enter the festival circuit in 2014 and be broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS in 2015.

Black American Indians seek to honor their mixed ancestry

Al Jazeera America
2014-07-22

Naureen Khan

WASHINGTON — The soaring sound of “Wade in the Water,” a Negro spiritual once said to be used on the Underground Railroad, filled Plymouth Congressional United Church of Christ Saturday morning.

But on this particular Saturday, church-goers offered their respects to the Great Spirit, in addition to the Holy Spirit, looked on as a Native American drum processional wound its way through the aisle, and took part in a ceremonial tobacco offering.

At the first gathering of the newly created National Congress of Black American Indians, organizers and attendees came to unite and celebrate individuals of both African and Native American ancestry — a subject often fraught with complicated questions of race, identity and citizenship.

Although Native Americans and African-Americans have crossed paths, intermarried and formed alliances since pre-colonial times, often uniting in their common fight against slavery and dispossession, their shared history has been slow to be unearthed and brought into the light.

The formation and the first meeting of the NCBAI sought to remove the taboo of mixed ancestry and bring together those who could trace their ancestry to both communities. The gathering received endorsement and letters of support from Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray and Prince George County Executive Rushern L. Baker III.

“This has been a conversation that has been avoided and pushed aside, and folks who have wanted to have this conversation have been marginalized, subjugated, separated, downtrodden, stepped on,” said Jay Gola Waya Sunoyi, one of the founders of the National Congress. “But still we’re here.”…

Read the entire article here.

Not So Black and White

Tree Spirit Publishing
2012
210 pages
9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0615568249

Alexis Wilson

Mixed marriage, abandonment, a mother’s secret, same sex parents, Broadway, the Ballet, and AIDS all make up a multi-colored tapestry of this author’s valiant journey towards a strong and clear passage; leaving the reader uplifted and wanting more.

It is the early 60’s in Europe, when a breathtakingly beautiful interracial couple dance great ballets together and fall passionately in love.  She is a Dutch ballerina and he is an African-American international ballet star.  They come to America and create a family and a new life.  While their daughter Alexis grows up dancing before she can walk, the marriage grows angrily apart.  Her father soon becomes one of the few celebrated black choreographers on Broadway, while her mother turns toward a shockingly desperate existence of survival.

At age eleven, Alexis’s world comes crashing.  Her mother abandons her and her brother and they are shuttled off to New York City to live with their adoring larger-than-life father, the footlights that beam on the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Chita Rivera, and the other man in her father’s life.

How Turbans Helped Some Blacks Go Incognito In The Jim Crow Era

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-07-19

Tanvi Misra

There’s a weekly trial on the Internet about who may be stealing culture from whom. Earlier this week, the defendants were Iggy Azalea and white gay men. A while back, it was Macklemore and the Harlem Shakers.

Now, we have come across a story from the Jim Crow era about cultural mimicry between people of color.

In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for “confounding the color lines,” writes Manan Desai, board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color — both foreigners and African-Americans — employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others — performers and businessmen — to gain access to fame and money they wouldn’t have otherwise had…

Read the entire article here.