White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind when he tried to kickstart a national discussion on race. Berger's book is subjective, fragmented and, most appealingly, devoid of piety. The son of a dark-skinned but racist Sephardic Jewish mother and a pale-skinned father who admired but didn't know blacks, Berger was raised in a mostly black New York City housing project, where he found himself navigating the shoals of identity and allegiance. In this book, he juxtaposes his memories and observations with a collage of interviews, anecdotes and quotes from other writers?many of them black?about the way we mythologize race. In some ways, this is a particularly good subject for such an approach, since attitudes about race are so much a matter of individual perspective and experience. And his broadening of focus allows Berger to encompass some potent voices, from the dreadlocked black person mistaken for Whoopi Goldberg to the white-seeming black artist Adrian Piper, whose Calling Card 1, a work of art and functional calling card, alerts people to racist remarks. But the format also has its limitations. Berger's treatment of affirmative action doesn't give enough credit to strong criticisms, and the story of his university education, in which black intellectuals were slighted, isn't followed by acknowledgment of today's multiculturalism. (He now teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York.) But Berger deserves credit?and readers?for coming up with an idiosyncratic way to think publicly about the vexing problems of race and racism.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.