White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness

PROLOGUE

(April 4, 1968)

Moments after a television news bulletin announced that Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead, my mother said he deserved to die. She rose up from the green sofa in the living room of our low-income apartment in the Lower East Side projects and began venting her grievances about the civil rights leader: He was a troublemaker. He was selfish and self-serving. He was poisoning the country. He was ungrateful to those brave and foolish white people who stood by his side in the civil rights movement. He was giving all the bigots in the South a reason to hate the good schwartzes, and the Jews, and anyone else who was not like them.

The things my mother said about Dr. King were not inconsistent with some of the other things she tried to teach my sister and me: that only light-skinned blacks were worthy of our attention and respect; that black people smell like baked beans; that black people were generally not as smart as white people; and that we should refer to black people as schwartzes, the Yiddish equivalent of niggers. (Sometimes she would outsmart unsuspecting schwartzes by reverting to a secret code, known only to her and her children: she would instruct us to use the word weisse, or whitey, whenever a black person was around, so that he would not know that we were talking about him.)

Confused and frightened by her tirade that night, I excused myself. As I walked down the hall to the bedroom I shared with my sister, I heard my father sobbing. He never watched TV with us; he would usually retreat to his bedroom after dinner, read the newspaper—The New York Times for the hard news, the Post for its liberal commentary—and listen to the radio. The door to his room was open; I walked in without knocking. He was crying so hard he was unable to speak. His behavior frightened me even more than my mother’s. I was nearly twelve years old, and I had never seen my father cry. Tears rolled down his face as his finger pointed to the radio, which blared updates on the assassination. What a nightmare, he finally muttered. I lay down next to him, put my head on his chest, and remained there for the rest of the evening.

MOTHER

More than anything, my mother’s life was shaped by her otherness: the darkness of her skin, eyes, and hair; her Sephardic heritage; her Hispanic-sounding maiden name. More than once she had been called a spic. More than once she had been called a kike, a hebe, a Jew bastard. More than once she had lost a job because a producer or casting director thought she was too dark or too Jewish. My mother was the embodiment of the mutability of race, the evidence that terms like black and white are imprecise at best, living proof that miscegenation has blurred the racial boundaries of almost every one of us, confirmation that race itself is socially and culturally constructed.

In nineteenth-century America the law in many states would have qualified people lighter-skinned than my mother as black because of the traces of African blood that coursed through their veins. But by the 1920s my dark, small grandfather could slip past rigid quotas and through U. S. immigration as white on the basis of his word and the implied promise that he would strive to meet the immigrant ideal of an all-American whiteness.

My mother’s earliest memories were shaped in an environment of prejudice and fear. She was born in Germany in 1920. Her father, Norbert Secunda, a research assistant in the mathematics department of the University of Hamburg, had confronted the usual bigotry known to Jews in Germany in the years before the rise of National Socialism. His projects at the university were often ignored or stripped of funding. The ranking members of his department, who, in polite conversation, would frequently refer to the fact that he was Jewish, encouraged him to find work elsewhere. Fearing that he would not survive this situation, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1927, leaving behind a steady income and most of his worldly possessions. His fears were prescient. By the end of World War II, nearly every member of both his and his wife’s families—scores of men, women, and children—had been killed by the Nazis.

Living in New York with her mother (her parents divorced soon after they immigrated), my mother decided to pursue a career as a singer. The prejudice she encountered played a significant role in undermining her professional life and destroying her morale. While she gave recitals at the Metropolitan Opera House, the old Brooklyn Paramount, and other venues in the late 1930s and early 1940s, her revered voice teacher, a retired soprano assigned through one of the programs of the Works Progress Administration, was a destructive bigot and Jew hater. She continually warned my mother that if she did not convert to Roman Catholicism and capitalize on the Spanish good looks that would easily allow her to pass for Gentile, she would never make it in the professional opera world. My mother, an Orthodox Jew, would not even consider the idea. The teacher, initially one of my mother’s greatest supporters, retaliated by relentlessly assigning Christian hymns (which my mother refused to sing), cutting back on her participation in student recitals, and refusing to write letters of reference or recommend her to agents and producers.

My mother’s dark, ethnic looks frequently prevented her from getting roles, even bit parts, in the small theater companies she turned to after her opera career stalled in the 1940s. She changed her name to the all-American, professional-sounding Karen Grant after a number of agents and producers warned her that her given name, Ruth Secunda, sounded too exotic, too Spanish, too Jewish. (The name Secunda had achieved national prominence in the late 1930s after the Yiddish song Bei Mir Bist du Schön, written by a relative of my mother, Sholom Secunda, became a hit for the Andrews Sisters.) After a brief stint in Miami in the late 1940s—where daily trips to the beach rendered her an even deeper shade of brown, leading producers to typecast her for roles in Latin nightclub revues—she returned to New York and took up work as a lingerie salesgirl. The only parts she could get were in the small Yiddish theater companies that still dotted Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

My mother’s career ended when she met and married my father in 1954. Broke and living on the Lower East Side with her obsessive, overbearing stage mother, she saw my father as a way out of her failed life. Listening to her scratchy old 78 rpm demonstration records years later, I realized that her voice—an amalgam of coloratura grace, overwrought emotion, and quivery vibrato—probably would not have made her a star. But I have never doubted that racism and anti-Semitism helped to undermine her self-image and her will. She would never forgive the bigots who she believed thwarted her professional life and forced her to trade a future on the stage for a life of poverty and hardship. Even on her deathbed, she found a way of blaming her terminal illness on prejudice. Medical researchers had long suspected that cancer was caused by repressed rage, she told me, and an early death was the price she was paying for years of buried anger against the Jew haters who had destroyed her life.

WHITE

In May 1996, Nightline aired a weeklong series, America in Black and White, on racial division in the United States. The first two episodes dealt with an incident that had occurred months earlier in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia. Eight hours after an African American woman, Bridget Ward, moved into the white, working-class neighborhood with her two daughters, her home was vandalized. Racial epithets, including Die Nigger Die and Leave Nigger Now, were scrawled on her front steps and ketchup was splattered to simulate blood. Although some white neighbors went to Ward’s house to apologize and welcome her to the community, others were featured on local and national TV news programs spewing racist venom: It’s against the law, but if they get them out, that’s fine … Bluebirds don’t mix with robins … She should have expected trouble. Nobody wants mixed people in their neighborhood. Ward was given twenty-four-hour police protection and a police escort for her children. Two weeks later, she received an anonymous letter threatening violent damage to her house. Disgusted and fearing for her family’s safety, she decided to move out of Bridesburg. I don’t need all these hateful people around me, she concluded.

Nightline followed up its report on this incident with a mini town meeting in which a small group of the neighborhood’s white residents answered questions posed by the show’s host, Ted Koppel. Respondents, at times, seemed tentative and unsure of their feelings. One woman felt at once ashamed and afraid of her racist neighbors and apprehensive about the possibility that black people might bring crime to the neighborhood. The group, however, could not agree on how much racism there was in Bridesburg. One man, responding to another’s claim that Bridesburg was home to many people of color, reminded his neighbors that the community of six thousand had only a handful of black residents. When another man declared that the thing we want in this neighborhood is good people without regard to their race, one woman snickered in disbelief. One man snapped back that race was the issue for most residents. Why lie about it? he asked.

The anxiety that many in the group appeared to share was that integration might endanger the integrity and future of Bridesburg. As Ted Koppel summed it up: I’ve heard fears expressed … that what you are concerned about is … that the community you’ve established, the safety you’ve established, the property values you’ve established could in some way be damaged if African American families were to start moving in … You’ve cited other communities in the Philadelphia area where you say that has happened and it has caused the whole community to go downhill.

On the second night’s broadcast, Koppel ventured deeper into the race question. If blackness could depreciate the value of their community, he asked, was their own whiteness, conversely, in some way valuable? Starting from the premise that skin color is not something white people dwell on in the United States, Koppel wondered if whites just don’t understand the difference between living one’s life free of racial prejudice and constantly dodging the bullets, both large and small, of racism. A Nightline poll confirmed this suspicion: while 75 percent of black respondents agreed with the statement that blacks and other minorities [were] discriminated against in housing, only 44 percent of whites held this view.

To shift the attention of the group toward a more self-conscious assessment of their own racial attitudes, Koppel asked a question that was a variation on a classroom exercise designed by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker more than twenty years earlier. Hacker proposed a hypothetical situation to his white students: It is now the future, and you find out that a government agency and not genetics determined your race and the race of every baby born in the United States over the past number of years. One morning, a representative of this government agency responsible for determining race comes to your house to inform you that you were born the wrong color and within hours would be involuntarily returned to your proper race. The government has set aside some money, he tells you, that it offers as grants to help people in your situation adjust to your new racial status. How much economic compensation, Hacker asked, would you seek if you were changed from white to black? How much do you want? Koppel asked his group of white respondents. How much would it take?

With this provocative question, the group’s understanding of the power relationships of race seemed to shift. People who moments earlier had denied that racism was a problem in Bridesburg now were willing to concede that being black in America might be more difficult than being white. I would take $50 million, then I could live anywhere. I wouldn’t have to deal with any racism, remarked one man. I’d rather be white, interjected another. It’s easier. I admit that it’s easier to be white. I admit that blacks got a bad hand dealt to them. In this role-playing exercise, while most respondents insisted that it was not being black, per se, but the government’s mistake and the problems associated with adjusting to a new race that merited them lavish compensation, each clearly saw his or her whiteness as an