Synopses & Reviews
The acclaimed work that debunks our myths and false assumptions about race in America
Maurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who worshiped Martin Luther King, Jr.; 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 examine the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book.
Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling opinions about race. The result is an uncommonly honest and affecting look at race in America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.
Maurice Berger grew up in the Simon Baruch Houses, a public housing project in New York City. He is a Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School for Social Research. He lives in New York City.
A native of the radically charged New York of the 1960shis father was a Jewish liberal who worshipped Martin Luther King, Jr.; his mother, a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew who hated blacksBerger is an articulate and passionate observer of race relations. In White Lies, he brings a unique sensibility to the manifestations of blackness and whiteness in everyday life, debunking our myths and false assumptions about race in contemporary America. Uncommonly frank and stylistically engaging, Berger's book juxtaposes a series of short yet telling citations on the politics of race (as culled from the work of James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Edward Said, Langston Hughes, Public Enemy, and many others) alongside Berger's keen, personal, and often disturbing vignettes about his own racial coming-of-age. "What is whiteness worth, [Berger] wonders, and at what cost? . . . A dazzling virtual discussion . . . Startlingly original."Laurie Adlerstein, The New York Times Book Review
"White Lies take[s] intellectual and emotional risks, and the risks pay off . . . [Berger's] genuine self-scrutiny breeds a kind of honesty and courage that nothing else can."Margo Jefferson, The New York Times
"We know far too little about the origins of passionate antiracism among whites, and Berger's frank autobiographical sections provide soaring insights . . . White Lies brilliantly charts the decidedly nonlinear process through which intellectual work and everyday life taught him that the inhumanity involved in embracing [the] privileges [of race] carries too high a cost."David Roediger, The Village Voice
"The measure of a good book is in how far it chases readers somewhere new . . . Using poignant autobiographical reflections, recent media events, and comments from other writers, artists, and researchers . . . White Lies is an equal opportunity for everyone to examine how the paradigm of racism limits personal thought and freedom."Bill Curtis, The Baltimore Afro-American
Review
"The quoted passages . . . reveal exquisite taste and gather classic accounts of what whiteness means . . . Berger's frank autobiographical sections provide soaring insights."--
The Village Voice
Synopsis
The acclaimed work that debunks our myths and false assumptions about race in America
Maurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who worshiped Martin Luther King, Jr.; 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 examine the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book.
Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling opinions about race. The result is an uncommonly honest and affecting look at race in America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.
About the Author
Maurice Berger grew up in the Simon Baruch Houses, a public housing project in New York City. He is a Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School for Social Research. He lives in New York City.