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`White Lies'

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In his latest book, author
Maurice Berger searches the
subject of race for its multiple
and intricate meanings.

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compassion. Early on, he realized that
the things his mother was saying about
their neighbors just weren't true. "It
:11ff aurice Berger has been
wasn't hard for me to understand that
told that he was "born
the color of skin mattered," he says.
to write" his latest book,
He noticed how for many of his
ci
White Lies: Race and the
neighbors and classmates, being black
Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and
"didn't make their lives easier" and he
Giroux; $23) and he doesn't disagree.
saw many of their lives fall apart —
Both inside his family's Orthodox
although he acknowledges that pover-
home and in the outside world of
ty also had a role. "The edge I had
their city housing project and public
was white skin. Since I was a kid, I
schools, he grew up with a heightened
felt motivated to try to help."
awareness of race.
As an adult, and a
In the Bernard
victim of anti-
Baruch houses on
Semitism and homo-
the Lower East
phobia (although he
Side of New York
says they can't be
and in school in
compared to racism),
the '50s and '60s,
he understands the
he was one of
importance of work-
very few whites
ing for change.
and felt like an
ei
A cultural historian
ea...*Iestvto,
•
cots
outsider — "a
who
is a senior fellow
• rk,z,
position that
at the Vera List Center
white people are
for Art and Politics at
not usually in,"
the New School for
says the 43-year
Social Research in
old author.
New York, Berger has
Inside the
been writing about
MAURICE BERBER ,
Berger home,
race for about 15 years
racial awareness
from his "unique per-
also was perva-
spective."
sive. His mother
It's not that he
was a Sephardic
sees himself as a
Jew who desperately tried to cover up
bridge between the races, or between
her dark skin; she didn't hide her feel-
blacks and Jews, but, potentially, as a
ings of prejudice toward the blacks
bridge to people's own racial atti-
and Hispanics living around them.
tudes. The book is provocative in
His father, a fair-skinned Ashkenazi,
inspiring readers to look deeply at
in the tradition of the Jewish left, was
their own beliefs and question them,
open to blacks and felt he understood
as the author does his.
their struggles.
White Lies, published at a time
The book opens on the day of
when many books on race fill book-
Martin Luther King's assassination. In
store shelves, is unusual in its format.
the living room, his mother ranted
It's part memoir: Berger recalls his
about how King had poisoned the
childhood experiences with candor,
country and "deserved to die," while
whether watching his mother at her
in the bedroom, his father wept,
make-up table, experiencing his
lamenting the "nightMare." The
father's crippling emotional illness or
author stayed with his father.
attending a local Jewish day school on
Growing up, he says, he learned
scholarship after he was beaten up in

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