Movie “Little White Lie” Creator Lacey Schwartz Talks Not Knowing She Was Black [VIDEO]
Ebro in the Morning
HOT 97, WQHT 97.1 FM
New York, New York
2014-11-26
Ebro Darden, Co-Host
Peter Rosenberg, Co-Host
Laura Stylez, Co-Host
Could you imagine living your entire life not knowing your true ethnic background? Movie director Lacey Schwartz can. Watch her talk about her new film “Little White Lie” and more:
[00:07:02] Ebro Darden: I existed in a world where I didn’t really… my mother’s mother had passed… when she was young. My mother’s father didn’t acknowledge me at all. Um, and even to this day, my mother likes to debate it as if he didn’t acknowledge me for some other reason other than race…
Lacey Schwartz: Hmm. Hmm.
Darden: When it was really race. When it was straight-up the fact that she had a son who was half-black.
Schwartz: Yeah.
Darden: Some of her step-siblings were cordial, but it wasn’t like a full embrace. So I got embraced mostly by my father’s side of the family…
Schwartz: Hmm. Hmm.
Darden: That’s how I was raised. That was the culture I was around. Which obviously plays itself out now… Um, in some ways because I consider myself black. I’m mixed-race, but I consider myself black. There are mixed-race individuals though, who consider themselves mixed, other, whatever, blah, blah, blah…
Schwartz: Yeah.
Darden: But I did just hear you say that you consider yourself “black.”
Schwartz: I do. I consider myself black. I consider myself biracial too. But for me—I’m not trying to define it for other people—because as you just said, other people feel differently. But, I look at being biracial as a category of being black.
Darden: And why is that?
Schwartz: You know, I think it really comes down to feeling like a person of color… like “other.” You know, and this ideal that whiteness so much is not really embraced or fully identified in this country, you know it is almost looked at as a neutral. And I don’t feel neutral. You know so, do I think that there’re elements of me that is connected to the fact that I grew up white. And I do think that I have a unique experience. That I grew up white and I do know what it is to be black, I identify as black…