well my name is going to sherman and i am your host and my guest today is lacey schwartz lacey is a writer producer and director and she's here today to talk about her documentary really her story little white lie welcome likely by you for bearing with us we're having some technical difficulties here but we're working them through some folks thrilled that you're here and i saw your documentary about a year ago shown at the princeton public library you were there to answer questions and it really provoked a lot of discussion afterwards and that was why i was so excited to get you on the show so we're going to start out with a little trailer from the documentary a little white lie like i come from a long line of new york the great granddaughter of eastern european immigrants who brought their culture and traditions to brooklyn when never occurred to me that i was passing i wasn't pretending to be something i all right so now let's get back to your story so you know it's very provoking to watch you know the little snippets that we saw but here you are you grew up in a jewish family you know assuming that in woodstock and with a big extended family with all the traditions always assuming as we always do that we belong to the family we belong and we are just like our parents and then you started  about something at the same time we're being told them or convincing ourselves another reality and i really sat down you know when i started this which was in my mid twenty's when i was living in very much a racial closet because after i found out the truth i didn't talk to anybody it's about the truth of my story and so obviously i'm talking about this now in hindsight looking back and really and was really interested when i decided to move beyond looking at this question of how did this happen you know how did we get we convince ourselves to believe what we want to believe i didn't really think it was just this idea of straight you know late lions it was really a deeper psychological game that we were playing in the sense of religion not so i think your question for me was about really that's now being learned behavior from my parents but very much from a young age learning that denial and realizing that even though i was going to question some spaces and i was very much internalizing the insecurities that looking  also rationalizing away and getting rationalizations from my family about why i did not the way that's so well articulated you know because again it's not about people being malicious or but i think and sometimes you could watch something like this and i remember thinking about your mother like she even i think for periods of time convinced herself that no we're not rodney's child  but i think the denial is often just a question of a hope like it's not like some people don't tell the children that they've been adopted and if the children never find out you know life goes on so i think denial is not necessarily malicious it's a way of relating to the world and like you said it kind of was learned and for me question also came up like so you applied to georgetown and so at this point you were in the questioning phase of your your racial identity and so you didn't check off the box that said park asia and are african american or whatever and you just have patched a picture and you got accepted as an african american student did you tell your parents that i didn't you know i also want to go back to something as you were saying in terms of you know with kind of what your parents pass aren't you is that i really think so much of it is it's so easy in a sense for parents to stigmatize their their children's existence you know we were raised to almost be embarrassed about the reality of our situations so we think it's just so fascinating to me how the norm the paradigm still exists where it's was be like your grandmother you have a father or you live in a house together you know that so actually increasingly so few people's reality but it still is actually the north by which we define ourselves and i think it's so embarrassed about if you don't tell them so i think that that is really the case and so by the time i apply to college much aggression by the time and apply to college i had already been living with that denial quite a long period of time as i time different reasons i start questioning more and more why i look the way that it started realizing i mean part of it is it's really important to understand that i grew up in a space that was like a white liberal space where race wasn't really talked about so it was also about this incredible lack of racial consciousness that i quit and so as i got older especially once when when i went away to college it was really about being in a racial consciousness that racial and that helped me also question things and look at were kind of sitting down and talking everything out around the dinner table right yeah and so you know and again i'm just trying to step into your shoes and we you know the young human experiences is so personal and yet very much we all have some of the same so you know you grew up a believing your white questioning at a certain point and then you go away to college and you're excepted as an african american but then the how do you step into that identity because that's not your experience yeah i mean i didn't just step into it you know holding completely at that time it was also about being invited to certain spaces and going into the space for the first time so even that was fully gradual process but it was more gradual it might seem it wasn't like you know overnight it's just awesome to have this new identity and you know about what you said about kind of stepping into my expect i think that you know as a reporter we all have these pieces that we relate to write about my story and that's what's been so interesting fascinating about sharing it where it's not in anyone just about  but it's really about how so many of our stories happened and how you know we want to look outside of ourselves and look at other people and think oh well eight out of that be happened see happen but so frequently that it's not it's not the right it actually is  much things don't always been that way and where i loved being able to share this film is opening that conversation helping people open their own questions in a positive productive way in terms of what has happened in their lives and trying to understand it's so interesting for me because as i was watching all the film clips and listening to some of your talks you know there's the whole thing about denial and then secrets and then there are some things that you could actually say might be better left as a secret not everything has to be said and that can be tricky you know that can be also where people justify holding things back but you know again i think it's an individual exploration of what's the lie so you know it's like some people will regale their children with their past traumas and dramas and thinking that by sharing that it somehow empowers their children but i've heard stories that really disempowered their children and frightened their children and left them with a legacy that they didn't necessarily want so in this whole question of you know little white lie do you ever grapple with what should be or what should have been said like what if your parents had told you did you ever kind of think about and that's me that decided share but i thought a lot about that because i mean it is film is a story about me even though my parents actions resulted in the reality of my existence and identity you know not making  my parents are to their relationship that isn't in the film and this is a film about me or my coming of age my identity and so i think it even going back slightly in the white lie you know i wear and like that look at what i'm doing with a little white like why do you share permission and how you share information you really have to look at the process of how you're sharing it and through reason you're sharing where you're trying to get with it i think that's great and it's true when i did see the documentary if you weren't playing the blame game in there in any way whatsoever and i like that you know the way you articulate it is it was about your process so one of the things that you said somewhere along the way was you wanted to look at your relationship with the dad that you grew up with so rodney your biological dad died and from what i understand that kind of was the impetus for you to yourself as biracial and you identify how did that come about because there is something very specific about identifying as black so you do it you identify as black because you're not white or do you identify as black as a choice you wanted to make because essentially you're biracial so what does being black mean to you and why did you choose to identify yourself that way  lived experience that collective identity that awareness that that that's what i connect to and so for me i do very much identify as being biracial or to challenge who i am of growing up in a white family  talked about that i thought was really you know something very human is is this idea that in this process you didn't want to give up who you knew yourself to be inside of a jewish family and those traditions so what has happened with that and how when you raise your children yeah i think that you know i never really was questioning whether i would be jewish it was just that i grew up in a space where being jewish was synonymous with being white and so when i was kind of presented with this image where if you were jewish you had to be this it was more about learning how to be jewish and something else about really increasing my own understanding of what it could be to be jewish and so and the reality is i didn't grow up with that model of what does jewish diversity look like and so something that i'm very committed to executive producer of our organization is an organization koppel whole show which as global jews  and so i wanted to ask yes so now you make this film and you're exposing family secrets so how do you stabilizing did that feel to your family you know i think when you're making a we're proud of the results of it and i think that once they were silent before most of them sat down and they felt the same way and so it's been a really positive experience for me overall so as is so now you're at this point in your life where you've done all this how are you different internally in the way you experience the world you know i think i'm much less through how many people really speak family secrets and the struggles to their relief and you can infect them very deeply their whole lives and i knew very firmly that that was not the experience that i want to have that i really want to chip will forward my life but it doesn't mean that you work it all out perfectly but really free not to be a sense source of anxiety for me going forward so i really coming out of that still honestly a very good and i suspect it has altered the lives of your need him or my mother to heal in order for me to heal and i could actually be very open about things and they could still continue to not talk about it they watched you and it was really their actual words what they want to do with it once i decided to move forward  h and you're right you know it's their individual journeys and it doesn't you don't all end up on the same page but you're in the same book so going forward like what now has evolved for you think you have this website where people can you know share their secrets what has come out of that for you and then you know you've now evolved to this place in life where is the next and we use that as tools to make change to have conversations we think are important and that's what we're hoping to do with the right lie obviously i'm also the subject of the film so in about my own personal evolution but i'm not it's not the only reason i'm doing and so we have some there at the blanks and you can submit your own story into this quote so it's part of it is to get you thinking about your own story and sharing your truth and their offline versions of fourteen card discussion card game where you can order and work on so there's a lot of other projects that were on as well and you part of it is my personal connection to them but they're not all around this specific story interesting when we were at the library and you know when you see what kind of resonates or gets triggered in people because you know we all can look at the same event and have a different interpretation of what's going on and i don't remember people being very engaged afterwards but i remember one person standing up and saying i think your mother was the most narcissistic person on the planet and then another point of view might be i think she was the most courageous person on the planet and because for keeping the secret and so again you know it's always looking at how does this what does this trigger in me so have you had anybody report anything that was actually at the end of our time and i want to really thank you for not only being a willing gas but for doing the kind of work you're doing and is there anything that you want from us as a website and get involved in that conversation through the game if you go onto our website which again is a little white lie you can click on our game and watch the film and just really how you yes i think that's great and i invite people to do that and i you know the film has won some awards and recognition and it was i saw in my new york times critics pick the documentary a little white why lie would provocative simply for what it says about race and identity the film is a searing portrait of collective denial a diagnosis from within from which mr schwartz doesn't exempt herself so i do invite people to check it out and i thank you again for being with us my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us