But Schwartz, a 38-year-old film-maker, has brown skin, curly hair and
full lips. It was only when she was 18 that her mother admitted the
truth: that she had had an affair with a friend and former colleague who
was black. And that, in all likelihood, he was Lacey’s biological
father.
The revelation not only shook her relationship with her mother to the core, but also led Schwartz to question everything she had believed about who she was, and eventually inspired her to make a documentary about the experience, called Little White Lie.
“I started out wanting to make a film about being black and Jewish, because I was really struggling with my dual identity,” she says. “But I was living in a racial closet at the time that was all about my family secret. So I decided to use the film as a way to fully uncover the secret.”
When we meet, last month’s reports about Rachel Dolezal, the American civil rights campaigner who made headlines around the world by claiming that, despite being white, she “identifies as black”, are still to break. But Schwartz tells me she believes that racial identity is “fluid and contextual”.
“I think it can change depending on where you are and who you’re around,” she says. The film shows Schwartz and two black female friends discussing the “one drop rule”: the idea that if a person has even the smallest amount of black heritage, they are black. “Being bi-racial, mixed race, is a category of being black, not a category of being white,” Schwartz believes. “It’s an inclusive thing.”
We meet in New York’s SoHo on a sunny afternoon. Having spent most of her adult life in the city, Schwartz now lives in New Jersey with her lawyer husband, Antonio Delgado, and their 18-month-old twins.
Schwartz describes her own childhood, in the countryside near Woodstock in upstate New York, as “solid, comfortable, loving”. Her father, Robert, was an accountant, and her mother, Peggy, owned a wine shop.
Although Lacey was an only child, she was close to her numerous aunts, uncles and cousins. “I came from a long line of New York Jews, the great-granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants,” she says. “We went to the synagogue, bar mitzvahs, Hebrew school. My family knew who they were, and they defined who I was.”
Leafy, middle-class Woodstock was a liberal town but it was also very white. Schwartz has a vivid memory of being five and a little blond boy in her all-white kindergarten class asking her to show him the colour of her gums. “It was the first time I remember feeling different,” she recalls. “I already knew I didn’t look like the other kids at school, but it was embarrassing to be singled out, and it made me feel ugly.”
Afterwards, Schwartz asked her parents why she looked different, and her father showed her a picture of his great-grandfather, a brooding, Moorish-looking Sicilian, and told her that she must take after him.
And that, she says, simply became the accepted story. “You know how things are within families,” she shrugs. “You know what you know, and you reinforce that truth all the time. If you looked too closely at it, it didn’t make any sense. So we didn’t look at it.”
But others sometimes took a peek; new friends would often ask if she was adopted, while established friends silently accepted the story they’d been told. One old friend admits she “knew Lacey looked black, but that she wasn’t”.
A family friend refers to the issue as “the 600lb gorilla in the room”, which would occasionally beat its chest. Aged 11, Schwartz wrote in her diary that she wished she had lighter skin, and that she hated her curly hair.
When she was 13, a member of the synagogue told her that it was “so nice to have an Ethiopian Jew in our presence”. And at high school, “The black kids would stare at me and ask, 'What are you?’ I’d tell them I was white. But I was in denial too; I had my blinkers on.”
In Lacey’s mid-teens, Robert and Peggy’s marriage began to unravel.
“Their divorce was really hard; it completely shook my world,” Schwartz says. She believes that her mother’s affair was a factor in the break-up – although as she discovered while making the film, it wasn’t something her parents had ever openly discussed.
Her father, she later found out, suspected that something had happened but had only said so once, telling Peggy they should “put it behind them and move on” – he preferred to keep his blinkers on, too.
“I don’t think affairs are necessarily the cause of break-ups, they’re usually symptoms,” says Schwartz. “Relationships are complicated – why did my mother have an affair in the first place?”
Their divorce had a major impact on her. “My family had been this bubble, this supposedly perfect unit, so there was no incentive for me to question it. But when my parents split up, it made me question everything: who I was, what I had come from, who my parents were.”
She knew she wasn’t adopted: there were photographs of her mother pregnant and stories about her birth. “There are only so many other options. I definitely started questioning my paternity,” she says. She began to feel that there was something major her parents weren’t telling her, but had no idea how to talk to them about it.
When, at 16, she started dating her high-school boyfriend Matt, who was himself mixed race. People would ask if they were brother and sister, fuelling her doubts about her parents’ story.
“Matt would sit me down with my family photo albums and be like, 'Let’s talk about it,’” she recalls. “I told him my parents were splitting up, that I couldn’t deal with it just now. I think, deep down, I knew that there was a truth I wanted to find, but I wasn’t admitting it to myself.”
For Schwartz, the first big turning point was when she applied to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. On her application form, she left every box in the “ethnicity” section unchecked. “I’d only ever considered myself Caucasian; now, I wasn’t entirely sure any more. I didn’t know what to say, so I simply left it blank.”
However, she had submitted a photograph as part of the application, and on the basis of that, was admitted as a black student. It was an administrative “error” that Schwartz decided to run with. “The moment that Georgetown said, 'You’re black,’ they gave me the permission to start entertaining the idea of it myself,” she says.
Read the rest here
Ewo! this kind better sunday? It's well.
ReplyDeleteNow dat she knows, she's welcome
DeleteMtchewww....linda if news no dey kindly sit down do some oda thing with ur time rather than post irrelevant things, nobody will kill u or reduce ur income
DeleteLooool
DeleteRITA ORA should take note. Talk to her mama well, well.
DeleteLol
ReplyDeleteIs she blind. She is mixed race not black. Why do people that are 50 black and 50 white forced to say black. They are equally black and white and should embrace both. Unless any % of black contaminating white makes you black?
ReplyDeleteUmmm good point but if u live in the US if u Hv even only 1% black,u are considered black...so yh
DeleteOyibo doesn't accept mixed race...to them, once a black blood has entered, they consider the person stained, or black.
DeleteI agree
DeleteAm beginning to believe that news is now becoming a scarce commodity
ReplyDeleteWell....it still doesn't make you less than who u are....like I said "black is beautiful "......
DeleteOnly a woman knows who the true father of her child is.
ReplyDelete#TeamBlessed#
Aya..being lied to her whole life. I feel sorry for the father too.
ReplyDeleteYou're who you're and what God destined you to be
ReplyDeleteIs she blind...abi she no they see her skin color....
ReplyDeleteIs she blind...abi she no they see her skin color....
ReplyDeleteAkuko
ReplyDeleteConfuse ga di ma *in Nkoli's voice*
ReplyDelete~BONARIO~says so via NOKIA LUMIA
Hmmm
ReplyDeleteThis story tire me.
It's only a blind man that will call her white?. She looks completely mixed race.
ReplyDeleteShe has been deceived for a long time.She did not know that she has an Adulterous mother.
ReplyDeleteHer mum must be a racist for brainwashing the innocent woman
ReplyDeleteLOL this sounds eerily familiar like the yarn Uncle Rukus spurn in the show Boondocks! So can I call her Aunt Rukus?!
ReplyDeleteSad to grow up.with so many doubts. One good thg out of it though you probably wouldn't have been this pretty if you were full white. Consolation?
ReplyDeleteWetin I wan use dis do? I know her? Hian.
ReplyDeleteD writeup is a novel already if nt even d major film...
ReplyDelete* * * Linda's 1st Daughter * * *
wow
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Must have been hard for d mum...always staring her past and mistake( forgive my choice of words) in d face.....every fucking day....but harder on d girl still........especialyy at that point in ones life when u r trying to find yourself......and she doest even know where to start from
ReplyDeleteWow! That was an interesting story! Her life's story will really make a good movie!!!
ReplyDeleteSorry for you. But you should be happy that u are black. We are far better than those white apes.
ReplyDeleteChoi
ReplyDeleteRead the rest ko! The part wey you put here is even too long. Linda take note!
ReplyDeleteRead the rest ko! The part wey you put here is even too long. Linda take note!
ReplyDeleteWen dey will be telling all these women to close der legs dey wont hear... ur friend will buy i cold stone and flower den u spread ya legs like fools den born pikin, den scatter ur family. idiats!
ReplyDeleteDeception from parents is absolutely wrong....white or black, she's beautiful and shud be proud of who she's .
ReplyDeleteBelieve!
ReplyDeleteLong but a very interesting read. Like the mum said, it's cos she got pregnant for a black otherwise the truth would have been carried to the grave. I can imagine the number of black-black relationships and marriages living in such. Even when the folks see their wins and daughters have no direct resemblance to either side of the family, they will still continue till they land in blood transfusions and DNA which brings out the 'little black lies'.
ReplyDeleteOk Linda i will watch this on Netflix now, i always skip pass it lol
ReplyDeleteAway match...Lol
ReplyDeleteEyaaa for her
ReplyDeleteNow she knows
That's good and accept it wholeheartedly
Schwartz means black in German!
ReplyDelete#singing # THIS IS SUPER STOORY!
ReplyDeleteHer pussy will be sweet like pepper soup
ReplyDeleteNo one had to tell u.. u always knew u were black! You just didn't want to accept the fact that u are black and ask your momma who your daddy is
ReplyDeleteok
ReplyDelete