living in a cocoon
Lacey Schwartz and Mehret Moandefro (writers), Lacey Schwartz (director) Little White Lie / 2014
Lacey Schwartz and Mehret Moandefro (writers), Lacey Schwartz (director) Little White Lie / 2014
The facts, when they become known as her
parent’s relationship began to unravel, are simple, documented by what was
right before their very eyes, so obvious that even when she left the questions
regarding Lacey’s identity of her college application blank, Georgetown
University declared her a Black student, and she was immediately welcomed into
the Black Student Alliance.
How could anyone in Lacey’s place not
feel completely betrayed when the simple facts are revealed. Her mother, Peggy,
began an affair with a Black man, Rodney Parker, the same year she met Lucy’s
father, continuing the affair for several years and remaining close with Rodney
and his family throughout her married life. Despite all the “white lies” (quite
obviously, there is far more here than “one” lie) the rest of the family themselves
told Lacey, he mother secretly knew the truth, but withheld it, quite
obviously, for fear of destroying a marriage which was, in large part,
unfulfilling. But even when the relationship finally fell apart, Lacey’s father
finally doing the simple arithmetic, Peggy never speaks the truth. Was there
ever a moment of insight that her secret might literally explode one day in her
beloved daughter’s face?
The wronged father, Robert, in many ways,
is even worse. Yes, he has been lied to, continues to be lied to even as his
daughter attempts to frame her questions. But he is still more interested in
his own pain, wallowing in his own sense of wounded manhood instead of
attempting to help his daughter to explore the many ways in which he may not
only have participated in the “white lie” of their lives, but encouraged it.
Attempting to begin a conversation with him, Lucy queries whether he has
noticed that she has identified with being Black. His sharp retort that, of
course, he has noticed her interest in Black writing, music, friends,
etc.—appears to suggest that exploring
one’s identity is simply a matter of surrounding oneself in the artifacts of
what he imagines represent that racial identity. It appears that he (and
admittedly, at moments, even our narrator) has never imagined that there might
be millions of Blacks who do not define themselves by listening to so-called
Black music, by reading texts written by Black writers, or necessarily surrounding
themselves only with their Black peers. We can understand that, in attempting
to discover her own identity, that Lacey may be exploring cultural and social
behavior previously unavailable to her in her white-Jewish upbringing. But her
father cannot seem to even wonder if identity might be something one might want
or need to reimagine.
The “little white lie” that this troubling
film refers to is not simply the fact that the family and friends chose to lie
to Lucy and themselves, but that the entire society in which they were embedded
encouraged and allowed that and other lies—and, even worse, continues to
embrace the lie—that being Jewish and being Black (unless one might be of
Ethiopian heritage), being biracial, or being of several racial heritages
simultaneously is something best not spoken of, not even attested to by one’s
own vision. The lie arises from ignorance more than from evil intent. If one
seldom encounters anyone out of one’s cultural milieu, how can one even imagine
how other people live? The culture in which Lacey grew up was not racist
because it would not allow Blacks to
enter their community, but in the fact that it might not even recognize a Black
man or woman among their midst. The community in which the Schwartz’s lived (ironically,
as Lucy points out, the German word for black), was not just color-blind but
unable to visually and mentally make sense out anything around them, including
their own lives.
Late in the movie, Lucy asks her mother a
devastatingly important question, “Might Peggy, had not met Robert and not been
encouraged by her family to marry him, have married Rodney Parker, the Black
man who was Lacey’s father?” The mother, apparently, cannot recognize that
possibility, suggesting that her Jewish husband was clever and funny and,
besides, he had money. Her idea of identity, evidentially, has a great deal to
do with deep pockets.
The disturbing short film ends,
fortunately, with an implicit admission that identity is never one thing, but
is a series of shifting possibilities that often embrace contradiction and even
conflict. Marrying a Black man, we see Lacey dressed in white, celebrating in
what clearly is a Jewish wedding, the families from both sides coming together
to openly share an event that, almost for the first time, isn’t pretending to
be something else.
Los Angeles,
January 5, 2014
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