Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness
Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.
Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.
With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I think of the Black bodies which are the closest bodies to me in the world, and then... I imagine black bodies made to seem mysterious, threatening, holders of nightmares," says Lazarre in this unorthodox book that combines her experiences and observations as a white wife and mother in a black family living in a white world. If this sounds complicated, that's because it is. Lazarre (The Mother Knot) is acutely aware of her skin color and it is her heightened awareness that allows her to perceive black racism in this country so clearly, and more acutely than most whites. But as her sons gently inform her, she can never really know what it's like to be black, and so she doesn't try: instead, she gives her white, Jewish, woman's perspective on the racism she has noted in society, and also within herself. The result is a compassionate, compelling outpouring of anecdotal family stories and confessionals--and a brief but fascinating analysis of O.J. Simpson--that fine-tune the reader's awareness to racism in everyday life. Lazarre's voice is artful and measured, like a friend's, and her prose is thick with images one might expect from the director of the New School's writing program. Though a mere 138 pages, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness provides substantial food for thought for both white and black perspectives on the murky issue of race in America.
