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White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, by Maurice Berger
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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.
- Sales Rank: #457513 in Books
- Color: Tan
- Published on: 2000-04-28
- Released on: 2000-04-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .54" w x 5.50" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind when he tried to kickstart a national discussion on race. Berger's book is subjective, fragmented and, most appealingly, devoid of piety. The son of a dark-skinned but racist Sephardic Jewish mother and a pale-skinned father who admired but didn't know blacks, Berger was raised in a mostly black New York City housing project, where he found himself navigating the shoals of identity and allegiance. In this book, he juxtaposes his memories and observations with a collage of interviews, anecdotes and quotes from other writers?many of them black?about the way we mythologize race. In some ways, this is a particularly good subject for such an approach, since attitudes about race are so much a matter of individual perspective and experience. And his broadening of focus allows Berger to encompass some potent voices, from the dreadlocked black person mistaken for Whoopi Goldberg to the white-seeming black artist Adrian Piper, whose Calling Card 1, a work of art and functional calling card, alerts people to racist remarks. But the format also has its limitations. Berger's treatment of affirmative action doesn't give enough credit to strong criticisms, and the story of his university education, in which black intellectuals were slighted, isn't followed by acknowledgment of today's multiculturalism. (He now teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York.) But Berger deserves credit?and readers?for coming up with an idiosyncratic way to think publicly about the vexing problems of race and racism.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
White "lite" characterizes the type of racism on which Berger focuses in this interesting treatment on race relations. But that doesn't negate the substantial value of this book to the new genre that deals with whiteness as an appropriate focus of America's troubled race relations. Berger does a good job of highlighting the subtleties of modern racism as unconsciously practiced by white Americans. He notes that when such practices are pointed out, whites usually deny the implication, and embarrassment results. Berger also focuses on his own experience and background as a white orthodox Jew, growing up in New York. He was raised by a mother whose expressions of racism against blacks were mirrored by a preference, if not favoritism, his father felt toward blacks. Yet neither parent had substantive relations with blacks who were their neighbors. The book is rounded out with numerous race-significant experiences of some whites and a few blacks that further mirror the myths and lies under which we reflect, if not relate, in an interracial world. Vernon Ford
From Kirkus Reviews
A book that is both immensely interesting and ultimately frustrating: part autobiographical vignettes, part a collection of anecdotes and quotes by whites and blacks on how each group perceives the other. Berger, a senior fellow at the New School's Vera List Center for Art and Politics, has a fascinating background: he is the son of lower-middle-class Jews, his mother a dark-skinned Sephardi with strong racist attitudes; his father highly sympathetic to the civil rights movement. As a gay man, Berger also is sensitive to being an oppressed, often ``hidden'' minority. His many short topical chapters, on such matters as ``Rage,'' ``Fear,'' ``Envy'' and ``Beauty,'' focus in an immediate, personal way on ``the game of racial avoidance and evasion.'' Berger performs a real service in discussing the most uncomfortable aspects of his subject, such as the competitive racial resentment he felt against a black man who was awarded a prestigious fellowship when Berger appeared better qualified. He also demonstrates through the evidence of numerous informants that ``white people, while vigilantly aware of the presence of blackness, are most often oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color.'' Yet Berger's almost exclusive reliance on autobiographical and anecdotal material precludes him from exploring with sufficient depth or nuance most of the topics he touches upon. He also errs more profoundly in positing the existence of ``whiteness'' as something more than a racial category, without paying more than glancing attention to the fact that ``white'' is as much a social construct as ``black.'' Many whites may relate to blacks in terms of crude stereotypes (e.g., that of disproportionate black drug use; Berger shows that whites are about as likely to use drugs as blacks). But to speak of ``whiteness'' itselfand at the end of his book, Berger extols the emerging field of ``whiteness studies''may undermine rather than advance a thoughtful, self-reflective dialogue between two major American races by propagating still another racial/ethnic myth. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Original, surprising memoir unpeeling truths: ours and his.
By A Customer
Maurice Berger's WHITE LIES challenges--the writing is potent, distilled, and very clear; the content probes, through the vehicle of his own life and stories and writings of others, many assumptions, especially those of white people who may consider themselves beyond racism of any kind. The format is different and fresh, full of subtle (and not-so-subtle) surprises about our own attitudes, the world we live in, and the permeation of racism in our culture. The power of whiteness seeps into everything--an awakening to what's always been obvious to non-whites. But it is also a memoir, and equally fascinating in that repect. Here is a man who understands "otherness" and the powerlessness that goes with it. His youth is spent as one who is fiercely intelligent and sensitive, but trapped in his own, often confounding cage of otherness. In particular, the portraits of his parents are compelling, conveying Berger's love and frustration. In Berger's spare language, they come to life, almost jump off the page, as complicated and isolated, from society and each other. What he shows us throughout is profound, disturbing, but somehow hopeful. He portrays, rather than eviscerates, the realities of our society. I saw it more as a wake-up call than a condemnation. His vision is clear, and he opens our eyes as well. It's a book to think about long after the last page is read.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
excellent, insightful, caring
By A Customer
As others have noted here, Berger may seem to be preaching to the choir, but he's not. He makes the move made by many who have recently looked at whiteness in more subtle ways, showing that whites who consider themselves free of racial bias nevertheless favor white skin and embrace its privileges. Because of the way whiteness has been constructed in the United States, White Americans may be some of the most naive people on earth when it comes to understanding what other kinds of people are going through. This is partly because American whites are discouraged from understanding the privileges that accompany their own skin color, and increasingly encouraged to perceive instead its supposed disadvantages (how convenient for the powers that be, to keep the lower orders fixated on racial differences, rather than on the increasing abuses of class, such as the ever-widening income gap).
Almost any white person who openly, sincerely reads this book will learn something about the significance to their own lives of their racial status, and, hopefully, the ridiculousnesss of claiming that people of color now have more "advantages" than whites do. This is NOT a book that equates whites with good and blacks with bad; after all, Berger himself is classified as white (being a Jewish person who, like other white-looking Jews, has become white), and he comes across in his book as a very good person. It's also not a book that ends up making whites feel guilty for being white; instead, it probably makes most readers feel guilty if they continue thinking that white is a disadvantage, or that it's insignificant.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
A different perspective on race relations
By Doug Vaughn
Whenever whites write about race they run the risk of falling into any one of a number of traps: they can be patronizing when expressing concern, dismissive of real problems when trying to be "realistic", genuinely stupid in suggesting simplistic solutions that involve only individual attitudes while ignoring the impact of history, custom and economic factors and, most typically, having no awareness of how their own "whiteness" distorts their views of what MUST be normal and acceptable. Berger's book is unique, in my experience, in not only avoiding these pitfalls but going to great pains to make the reader aware of them. It is said that fish can have no concept of water since that is their only environment. In the same way, most whites are unaware of the weight of racial prejudice that is felt by all minorities, because they are immersed in the dominant culture, while those on the outside are painfully aware that they are outside.
Berger writes from a unique perspective; that of an intelligent and perceptive man reared in public housing in New York, whose mother was a racist and whose father was a supporter of the civil rights movement. He was not only aware of race as an issue early in his life, but was torn between his parent's opposing views while simultaneously trying to apply those contradictions to the people he knew outside the home - largely minorities. The issue seems to have obsessed him, but ultimately in a positive way. This book, part biography, part essay, part reportage, cannot be easily described. It is fragmented and impressionistic, but its focus is clear - to make the reader (and it seems to assume a white reader) really aware of all the unspoken lies that support the privalege of white power in America. It is hard to know whether he succeeds or not. This reader already sympathized with much that he had to say and was impressed with the way he managed to make subtle points clear. Would a real white supremacist be won over? That is doubtful, even if they read the book with an open mind. But they are not the intended audience. Rather, Berger is addressing those whites who like to believe they are not - in any way - racist. Until this group recognizes the subtle ways in which they cling to a privaledged position and the impact this has on minorities, there will be no improvement in race relations.
I enjoyed reading this book very much. Each chapter was a surprise and a pleasure. Some of the digressions seemed puzzling but for the most part everything in the book helped illuminate his theme. This is not a polemic or a Jeremiad, but a soft spoken and carefully thought out piece of writting. Once Berger's point of view seeps into the reader's consciouness, it's hard to see things the same way again.
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