THE DOCUMENTARY "Little White Lie" airing on "Independent Lens" WHEN|WHERE Monday at 10 p.m. on WNET/13
WHAT IT'S ABOUT Filmmaker Lacey Schwartz confronts what everyone in her life had been "overlooking": That the little girl from the nice white family in Woodstock was black. How did it happen? How could it happen?
The light-skinned Schwartz grew up in Woodstock, a fairly homogeneous white community, never thinking she wasn't just like her parents, Robert and Peggy, and an heir to a New York Jewish immigrant background -- despite the fact that in summer she certainly tanned up a lot darker than anyone else in the family. Robert Schwartz explained Lacey's coloring away by pointing to photographs of his dark-complected Sicilian grandfather, which in retrospect seems ludicrous. (The filmmaker's biological father, no surprise, was really an African-American, who had an extramarital affair with her mother.) Schwartz concludes that everyone was in denial. "If you looked too closely at it," the filmmaker says, "it didn't make sense. So we didn't look."
It's not until she applies to Georgetown University, attaches a picture of herself and is admitted as a black student, that she accepts the obvious. At which point there's something of a hole in the story: She transitions into black college life with nary a speed bump, and it's not until later that the confrontations with her parents get serious. Were they unaware that a major institution of learning had declared their daughter African-American?
Have y'all heard of this? The NPR story was really very interesting.
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