Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind Look inside this book. White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by [Berger, Maurice].
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- White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger
- White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
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- White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
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. Read more Read less. Prime Book Box for Kids.
White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger
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White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition April 28, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention race relations white lies white people berger book racism whites racial father racist america american mother blacks culture social attitudes prejudice present simply admit. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful.
The book has a lot of short stories about experiences that deal with race relations. It has a lot, like too many, like you may need to read about 50 pages and then begin you're paper on it. Very interesting stories, I recommend buying it for you social issues classes. Race and the Myths of Whiteness" several times. In fact, I am half way through it again.
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With each passage I can see myself walking with Berger when he was a child, a sibling, a friend, student and teacher. I found myself recognizing the impact of the power of language upon him from page to page. Much of what Berger was subjected to is not new. He is not alone in his experience of prejudice, in the assumptions from others of his inadequacy in the face of his poverty nor the exalted injections of his worth as a white person when integration was taking root in his community. There are obstacles to overcome where racism is concerned.
No doubt about it.
Self-deception weighs heavily upon each us where racism is concerned as every word, every nuance, every glance a child all children , any student all students absorb becomes a part of their struggle with everyday life for all of their life. What is new, painfully new We are the adult a child is watching, the teacher a student learns from, the parent our child relies upon. The problem of racism in our life is our problem. Since leaving college, I must admit that I have let my readings on race relations go by the way side since leaving college.
Back then I was steeped in thick sourcebooks and studies on racism and the African-American experience in America. The reason that prodded me to pick up this book is that it was written by a New York Jew of "mixed" Ashkenazi and Sephardi decent and I as a Black Jew was interested in what he had to say. Besides, it's size marked it as "light reading". Berger's book is a goldmine of thought provoking explorations in modern American racism.
It works strongly in his advantage that he is not some idealogical academic who holds copious amounts of "textbook knowledge" of African-American culture and just regurgitates it in some anecdotal way that is more patronizing than helpful.
White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
He also does not seem to hold delusions that he himself did not take advantage of thoughts of White superiority; although he has had his share of run-ins on the basis that he was a Jew - he does not lay claim that his exposure to anti-Semitism makes him any less culpable of flexing the muscles of racist thinking when the situation has suited him. I was pleasantly surprised that White people were not presented as the "evil ones" with rhetoric against the entire race as present in many works written by the "Black Power" type.
What is examined is the plague that governs the thought of most American White people; a thought process that can be easily changed if these people were brave enough to confront it. I'm guessing since I'm not White that it may take non-Black readers who have nominal, firsthand experiences with racism, re-reading this book a few times to totally "get it".
To "get" that to make personified assumptions on a person on the basis of their skin color is as logical as making personified assumption on a person on the basis of their eye color. Just for the record, even though I am an ethnic and religious minority, I do not go around with a chip on my shoulder - lamenting about the "oppression" dealt my way by WASPs. Oppression can be dealt by anyone at anytime in any manner. But it's about time that the general populace know that just because we no longer have separate drinking fountains for Whites and Blacks, that does not mean racism is gone and vanished.
Very little has been done as far as confronting the root of American racism; which is the value system of American Whites the majority. This book falls in the "has been done" category. Booklist Review White "lite" characterizes the type of racism on which Berger focuses in this interesting treatment on race relations. Publisher's Weekly Review Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind when he tried to kickstart a national discussion on race.
More than once she had been called a spic. More than once she had been called a kike, a hebe, a Jew bastard. More than once she had lost a job because a producer or casting director thought she was "too dark" or "too Jewish. In nineteenth-century America the law in many states would have qualified people lighter-skinned than my mother as black because of the traces of African blood that coursed throughtheir veins. But by the s my dark, small grandfather could slip past rigid quotas and through U. My mother's earliest memories were shaped in an environment of prejudice and fear.
She was born in Germany in Her father, Norbert Secunda, a research assistant in the mathematics department of the University of Hamburg, had confronted the usual bigotry known to Jews in Germany in the years before the rise of National Socialism. His projects at the university were often ignored or stripped of funding.
The ranking members of his department, who, in polite conversation, would frequently refer to the fact that he was Jewish, encouraged him to find work elsewhere. Fearing that he would not survive this situation, he immigrated with his family to the United States in , leaving behind a steady income and most of his worldly possessions.
His fears were prescient. By the end of World War II, nearly every member of both his and his wife's families--scores of men, women, and children--had been killed by the Nazis. Living in New York with her mother her parents divorced soon after they immigrated , my mother decided to pursue a career as a singer. The prejudice she encountered played a significant role in undermining her professional life and destroying her morale. While she gave recitals at the Metropolitan Opera House, the old Brooklyn Paramount, and other venues in the late s and early s, her revered voice teacher, a retired soprano assigned through one of the programs of the WorksProgress Administration, was a destructive bigot and Jew hater.
She continually warned my mother that if she did not convert to Roman Catholicism and capitalize on the "Spanish good looks" that would easily allow her to pass for Gentile, she would never make it in the professional opera world. My mother, an Orthodox Jew, would not even consider the idea. The teacher, initially one of my mother's greatest supporters, retaliated by relentlessly assigning Christian hymns which my mother refused to sing , cutting back on her participation in student recitals, and refusing to write letters of reference or recommend her to agents and producers.
My mother's dark, ethnic looks frequently prevented her from getting roles, even bit parts, in the small theater companies she turned to after her opera career stalled in the s. She changed her name to the all-American, professional-sounding Karen Grant after a number of agents and producers warned her that her given name, Ruth Secunda, sounded too exotic, too Spanish, too Jewish. After a brief stint in Miami in the late s--where daily trips to the beach rendered her an even deeper shade of brown, leading producers to typecast her for roles in Latin nightclub revues--she returned to New York and took up work as a lingerie salesgirl.
The only parts she could get were in the small Yiddish theater companies that still dotted Manhattan's Lower East Side. My mother's career ended when she met and married my father in Broke and living on the Lower East Side withher obsessive, overbearing stage mother, she saw my father as a way out of her failed life. Listening to her scratchy old 78 rpm demonstration records years later, I realized that her voice--an amalgam of coloratura grace, overwrought emotion, and quivery vibrato--probably would not have made her a star.
But I have never doubted that racism and anti-Semitism helped to undermine her self-image and her will.
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She would never forgive the bigots who she believed thwarted her professional life and forced her to trade a future on the stage for a life of poverty and hardship. Even on her deathbed, she found a way of blaming her terminal illness on prejudice.