Mixed Race Studies

Growing Up White Until a Family Secret Revealed She Was Not

The Root
2015-03-22

Genetta M. Adams, Senior Editor

In the documentary Little White Lie, filmmaker Lacey Schwartz spins a compelling story about embracing her racial identity.

Lacey Schwartz grew up as a white, Jewish girl in the predominantly white community of Woodstock, N.Y., raised by Peggy and Robert Schwartz. But what she didn’t know at the time was that her biological father was black.

The idea of “passing” for white has long been a part of African-American culture. But Schwartz’s story isn’t one about passing. She truly believed that she was white.

How she came to embrace her biracial identity and confront her parents about the family secret is the subject of her documentary, Little White Lie, which airs Monday on PBS as part of its Independent Lens series.

Judging someone’s racial identity by appearance alone can be tricky—the recent story about Nancy Giles’ reaction to Jay Smooth makes that point fairly obvious. But when Schwartz was a child, her light-brown skin and curly hair elicited comments from people outside her immediate family circle: At her bat mitzvah, a woman from the synagogue mistook Lacey for an Ethiopian Jew.

When Schwartz questioned her parents, her father showed her a portrait of her Sicilian great-grandfather, whose darker skin seemingly provided an explanation for her own. Schwartz, like everyone around her, bought this story…

Read the entire article here.

Do you identify as Black, mixed — how do you see yourself?

I’m both. Everything and nothing.

Clay Cane, “Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes: “I Don’t Think About Color”,” Black Entertainment Television, (June 25, 2013). http://www.bet.com/news/music/2013/06/25/brittany-howard-of-the-alabama-shakes-i-don-t-think-about-color.html.

Meet Elizabeth Liang from Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey

Culture Shock Toolbox
2015-03-23

H. E. Rybol

Elizabeth acts on stage, film, and television. A graduate of Wesleyan (after transferring from Wellesley), she is a published essayist (“Checked Baggage: Writing Unpacked,” “Transforming Three Sisters”) and has a column about creative adult TCKs at TheDisplacedNation.com. She is also the co-host of the intercultural podcast Hapa Happy Hour.

Her solo show, ALIEN CITIZEN: An Earth Odyssey, had its world premiere at the Asylum Lab in Hollywood in May 2013. It had its Off Off Broadway debut at Stage Left Studio in September 2013. Since then it has been performed at Princeton, M.I.T., Wesleyan, Williams, Augustana (SD), Carleton, and Santa Clara University in the USA. It was the closing keynote at the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) 2014 conference. It also began its tour of international schools and US Embassies in Panama; was sponsored by the API Cultural Center at the United States of Asian America Festival in San Francisco; and had its international theatrical debut at Tjarnarbíó in Reykjavík, Iceland.

How did you get into traveling?

My dad worked for Xerox (they made photocopiers) back when they were as big as Apple and Google are now, and they moved us from Guatemala to Costa Rica to the USA to Panama to the USA again to Morocco to Egypt. Some of my happiest memories from my youth are of the family vacations we were so fortunate to take in different countries.

I came back to the USA for college on the east coast, graduated and moved to the west coast for a career in the entertainment industry, and have been here ever since. I love to travel for pleasure, and I love to travel with my solo show, ALIEN CITIZEN: An Earth Odyssey, because I get to combine my three favorite activities: acting, traveling to new places, and indirectly: writing (I wrote the script)…

Read the entire interview here.

Navigating Through my Tamil-Filipino World: An Account of a Mixed First Generation Kid

Tamil Culture
2014-01-30

Shanelle Kandiah

Throughout my life, every time I have come to meet someone for the first time, I seem to always be asked about my ethnicity. Over the course of a conversation with someone, I can even anticipate the exact point that this question will be asked. The curious yet reluctant segway of “so…what’s your background?” or “where are your parents from?” gives it all away.

While these questions may be perceived as bothersome to other mixed kids, I cannot say that it ever really bothered me. I have always taken a strange sort of pride in describing my family. Having been raised by a Sri Lankan Tamil father and a Filipino mother, I have never seen my life as anything short of amazing. Growing up exposed to two rich cultures from two loving parents is something that is pretty difficult to fault.

Reflecting back on my childhood, there are certain memories that stand out as reflective of how unique my family may be perceived to the outside world. For instance, there were times growing up where my parents would host birthday parties for my brother and me, and would invite what seemed like everyone they had ever met in their lives. People of all shapes and sizes – not only Tamils and Filipinos, but Anglos, East Asians, and other mixed families – would always manage to seep into my house where they would be welcomed with open arms.

Our food at these events was often a mix of Sri Lankan catering with overwhelming amounts of pittu, hoppers and varying curries, alongside Filipino takeout trays of lumpia, chicken adobo and pansit. When coupled with the Tamil movie scores and Western music playing in the background, I would agree with outsiders who have deemed my family as not quite run of the mill. Even now, it seems overwhelming that so much cultural transactions occurred at these gatherings. Looking back, these times actually gave me some of my best childhood memories…

Read the entire article here.

Little White Lie

Independent Lens
Public Broadcasting Service
Monday, 2015-03-23, 22:00 EDT (21:00 CDT) (check schedule here)

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 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but an African American 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.

Schwartz 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.