Lacey Schwartz (1977- ) was a Jewish girl who did not know she was Black till she was 18.
She grew up in Woodstock, two hours north of New York City. Her parents were both White. White people accepted her as White, but asked why she looked different. She said what her father said, that her great grandfather was Sicilian.
At age 11, she still thought of herself as White, yet felt out of place, felt ugly, wished her skin was lighter.
At 16, her parents split up and, for the first time, she went to a school with plenty of Black students. They asked her, in so many words, why she was passing for White.
One day when she was walking down the street with her boyfriend, people assumed they were brother and sister. He was mixed-race!
By now she knew deep down she was not White, but could not admit it to herself. When she applied to Georgetown University and came to the box where you check race, she did not know what to put! She did not check anything. Georgetown wound up checking it for her: Black, based on her picture.
At Georgetown, the Black student union invited her to join. She did. She was afraid they would not accept her, that she would not fit in, that they would ask what she was. It was nothing like that:
“For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged. And somehow I just knew that Black is who I was.”
Her “bad” hair became “good” hair. Her “dark” skin became “light” skin. The ugly duckling became a swan.
When she came back home for the summer after her first year at Georgetown, she asked her mother why she looked different. Her mother told her that she had had an affair with a Black man, someone Schwartz knew as a “family friend”.
Schwartz continued to live as a Black woman out in the world, but remained White at home: to “come out” as Black would lay bare her mother’s secret.
For 12 years she remained silent, afraid of losing her father, the only true father she had ever known.
And during all those 12 years, her father – already knew. It was part of why he had split up with her mother.
In time, she found it unbearable living an identity based on lies and family secrets. It meant she did not know who she truly was.
So she got to the bottom of it by making a documentary film: “Little White Lie” (2014). It became an anatomy of denial.
Her mother hated it at first, but in the end she was glad: it freed her too from living in a world of lies and the guilt that comes with it. And, instead of losing her father, it made her relationship with him way better.
It does not escape Schwartz’s notice that her family is like the US as a whole. Or like Israel: she went there to show the film to both Arabs and Jews.
– Abagond, 2015.
Sources: Mainly TV2 Africa (2015), Salon (2015) and an awesome interview on Hot 97 (2014).
See also:
- David Myers: a black boy who thought he was white
- Sandra Laing: a black girl born to white parents
- Skin – the film. Excellent.
- James McBride: The Color of Water – another Jewish mother with secrets that screw up her child’s sense of identity
- passing for White
- biracial
- Jews
600
Saw little white lie a month ago. Pretty good.
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I have been seeing her a lot i think i first saw her on OWN and then i listened on NPR.
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Wow what a moment for the dad… in the delivery room, holding his wife’s hand, giddy waiting to see his child, so excited to be a dad! The doctor delivers the baby, cuts the cord, cleans the baby off a bit, hands it over… surprise!!! The guy’s heart must have sank, clear evidence he was cheated on, publicly humiliated. Poor guy. Nice he loved his wife’s baby though, nice man.
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Saw her on MSNBC fascinating story indeed.
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@Phil
It takes a real man strong man to raise a child that is not his. I applaud him.
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I was wondering when and/or if you were going to get around to covering this intriguing story of Lacey Schwartz, Abagond! lol ..For the record, many “Black/Half Black” babies can look just as “white” or non-Black as a lot of others are, especially considering how light complected many children from all backgrounds at birth-I mean, it’s not like Lacey is so “dark” skinned even now..just sayin’.
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..from all backgrounds are at birth, typo..
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This is ironic that you posted this on Lacey Schwartz and now BLM activist Shaun King’s racial identity is being questioned.
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http://m.snopes.com/2015/08/19/shaun-king/
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this article trashes shaun king
http://haitirewired.wired.com/profiles/blogs/using-the-web-celebrity-and
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@sharinalr @Lord of Mirkwood
Totally concur, but wow think of how that moment must have felt for him. Hopefully he knew it beforehand. Great man.
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So many white women who do this feel compelled to either
– lie to their kids
– give their kids up for adoption (and cut off ties)
– give their kids away to be raised by another family (even if they do not cut off connection 100%)
But, each of these 3 categories is broken and there are many tens of thousands of people out there who had to grow up with this.
Nonwhite women usually will just raise their kids when this happens, but apparently, even they may feel compelled to tell “little white lies”.
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Abagond also has an article on a white South African couple with a black daughter. I posted there that I suspected a coverup of some kind. This lady’s story illustrates the motivation for such a thing: shame and the desire to protect the spouse from embarrassment.
It’s also interesting that she considered herself white while being Jewish. Sometimes “Jew” is used as code for “not white” even by Jewish people when they want to appear to divest themselves of white privilege. But it seems that Jewish identity intersects with rather than substitutes for other categories of race and ethnicity.
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The Shaun King thing is funny because I always assumed he was white. I thought he identified as white.
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“For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged. And somehow I just knew that Black is who I was.”
Her “bad” hair became “good” hair. Her “dark” skin became “light” skin. The ugly duckling became a swan.”
Biracj
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Sorry, I meant to write:
“For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged. And somehow I just knew that Black is who I was.”
Her “bad” hair became “good” hair. Her “dark” skin became “light” skin. The ugly duckling became a swan.”
Biracial ppl are peasants among whites, but royalty among Blacks.
Just goes to show how black people privilege whiteness. How we participate in our own subjugation. It is true that moast black people are racist. They are racist against themselves.
Aren’t we also responsible for the racist culture of America?
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@solesearch
I really did not look at the statement that way, but I see what you are saying.
“Aren’t we also responsible for the racist culture of America?”—We play a part in it as we help to uphold it. Though I always saw it form a different angle. The willingness to support anything white over black. Our mistrust for each other etc. I would go further, but don’t want to take it off topic.
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@Mary Burrell
I don’t think black people should play into the game of denouncing Shaun King on his race. One thing I have noticed is a clear effort to dismantle any movement and it’s perceived leaders of any movement we have. If we play into it then we play into the hands of pushing the most active members away. I had my issues with Rachel Dolezal, but was she not out doing something?
There is an effort to make black people question BLM in place and I have seen a lot of black people start to question lately. We just need to support BLM and ensure it if fighting from all fronts.
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ensure it is fighting from all fronts.*
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@solesearch
Sometimes I find what you say very interesting, e.g., above you said
Yet in this post
you said
For me, I “knew” that Shaun King was black or at least part black and I “knew” that Bruno Mars was not.
I’d like to understand how people assign and label others’ racial and ethnic identity and then maintain that label assignment on someone else for a long time. I’m not being hostile, just trying to understand it better.
I can empathize with Shaun King a bit. His credibility is questioned on the basis of his racial identity, which forced him to release personal details about his family and his racial experience. What a painful thing — but readers on this blog did the same to me.
Shaun King, Rachel Dolezal, Lacey Schwartz – who is the fake? Can siblings with the same set of parents identify as different races? How do you feel about parents who lie to their children? How about if they are not aware they are lying?
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@sharinalr
I am glad you recognize it as a tactic to try to tear BLM apart. Do the BLM supporters recognize that?
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If these people (Dolezal, King etc) lied then it raises questions about their trustworthiness and motives. Any empolyer would start to re-evaluate your employment if they found out you lied about your background when you were interviewed.
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I found this article interesting:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/08/shaun_king_trolling_conservatives_and_the_reverse_paper_bag_test.html
Shaun King, Trolling Conservatives and the Reverse Paper-Bag Test
I think the whole issue on Shaun King is a derailment to BLM. It is trolling.
Sorry that this is about Shaun King and not Lacey Schwartz. If it is off topic, then that is fine, but it looks like readers and commenters here might want to see a post on Shaun King then.
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But Lacey Schwartz looks biracial i have to say the mother is the one who did this deceiving. It’s good Lacy Schwartz made White Lie. Secrets do make you sick. Lacey’s father was a good man to raise a child that wasn’t his. I bet her extended family could see something was different about Lacey. Well at least her mother can be free from her deception and have some peace.
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@MB,
so does Shaun King.
Would you say the same about Dave Myers’ father?
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Reverse paper bag test? No, that’s not the right analogy at all.
People didn’t do reverse paper-bag tests on Dolezal or King. They weren’t rejected because their appearance didn’t fit their professed identity. They said they were black and they were accepted as black. If they were being deliberately deceptive that’s a violation of the community’s trust.
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@jefe : If another man raises a child that isn’t his yes i would say they were. Why do you pose this question like this? I hope the kids don’t get abused by the father because he is angry at the mother for deceiving him. I need to go back and read Dave Myers story. I think the mother of Dave Myers was horrible and she was cruel. He was messed up behind this i remember that.
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@jefe: Shaun King looks like a light skinned black man.
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@ Jefe
I will allow comments on Shaun King here, because it is a similar sort of case and because I do not want to do a post on him. I do not even want to read his Personal Essay. It is like the Birther thing: a deliberate attempt to humiliate him, something no White man ever has to go through.
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I posted on open thread first about Shaun King but i thought Lacy Schwartz also mirrored each other.
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Deception is the operative word here. I was on another social medial site and Shaun King’s wife responded to the haters by saying this is Shaun’s story to tell and his mother’s story to tell. I said in the open thread this is a tactic by the people who want to tear apart the BLM. This is the dirty work of Breibert. They are some dirty SOBs that want to discredit this man’s activism work. The Blaze are some more dirty SOBs. They don’t care what color he is they just want him to shut up.
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Just to be clear, I don’t know anything about Shaun King or whether the accusations against him are true or not. However, I think it’s problematic if you lie about your background or represent yourself as someone you’re not while occupying a visible position in an organization or movement. I wouldn’t have the patience for that deceprtion. You’d lose my trust.
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If it were Dolezal 2.0 (and from cursory investigation it might not be) he’d deserve to be called out IMO.
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I just skimmed the story abagond referred to. A quote:
Shaun King:
“A part of this story has always been that I never chose to be black/interracial. Not only was it chosen for me by birth, but white students and staff fundamentally rejected me. Furthermore, the black community, my peers, their parents, and local black leaders, seeing that I was, in essence, a kid without a community, embraced me in the deepest, most soul-soothing ways.”
Yup. No reverse brown paper bag. King was accepted by the black community. Same thing with Lacey Schwartz. She was accepted. Dolezal was too but she was a liar. Her very visible deception probably helped create the kind of atmosphere in which the accusations against King could seem more credible initially.
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She’s literally as ditzy as Marissa Johnson. I saw the Netflix self documentary she made about herself. She was very honest and even included an ex-boyfriend that acknowledged her complete non-awareness of her entire situation with her real father, mother, and racial identity. I still see her as unapologetic about her narrow-mindedness and feel she still very much uncomfortable around different non-white people and culture despite marrying a black man and making the film “Little White Lie”.
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@jefe
I am unsure if they do, but I have been making efforts to remind blacks not to play into it. BLM need to focus on it’s cause.
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@Mary Burrell
I, for one, am glad you brought it up. These cases are a bit similar, but it does get us to take a look at tactics used to tear us apart.
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Her “bad” hair became “good” hair. Her “dark” skin became “light” skin. The ugly duckling became a swan.”
As an aside, really do not believe Shaun King is Black. If he was, it would not require these dissertations he, his wife and friend are posting on the internet. It would simply be a “Yes, I’m Black.” That answer is so simple, but he won’t give it. In the past he has supposedly stated his father is Black. Why all the subterfuge and, ” I don’t want to make my mother look bad” now? She would already look bad in her community. She’s a married WW (married to a WM) in a racist community who had a baby with a BM. The story is out. Why all the beating around the bush? I believe he’s lying. His answers to this simple question are all very “Dolezal-ish”.
Anyway back to the above. I really believe these White people do this because within their own communities they are a dime a dozen. They are nobodies with very little hope of being noticed. They’re not particularly attractive or special. But within the Black world they become SUPERSTARS.
To Whites Dolezal MIGHT be a 4, but to Black people she is a knock out, a definite 10: a blue eyed “Black girl” with long, bone straight, blond hair hanging down to her butt cheeks would be the alpha female in the Black community. She wouldn’t be able to beat the Black men off with a stick!!! Same goes for Shaun. Some Black women go crazy for a man with “good hair”. Also, Black people have a tendency to hand over leadership to people with more White features (thanks to 400 years of living under White supremacy).
People that look like Dolezal and King within the Black community are viewed as smarter, better and just plain ole worth more. Sad, but true. I truly think that’s why White people like them do this. They go from obscurity in one group to damn near celebrity status in another. They basically become “King of the Black People” WITH ALMOST NO EFFORT. It’s a White man’s fantasy come true. They are Tarzan and Sheera,Queen of the Jungle. Of course this is done with Black people’s consent. It couldn’t happen any other way.
To some people it just doesn’t make sense. Why would they give up their White privilege to become “Black”? Because ultimately, it is worth the step back…to step UP.
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@abagond
AGREE and empathize.
On my full birth certificate, my father got marked as “white” when he clearly wasn’t and wasn’t marked so on his marriage certificate. During the anti-miscegenation and racial integrity era, a lot of people had their racial classification tampered with.
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Jefe,
“I’d like to understand how people assign and label others’ racial and ethnic identity and then maintain that label assignment on someone else for a long time.”
I don’t understand the question. You’d like to know what physical characteristics determines a person’s race?
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Poster Jadapoo1 makes some very good points and sadly it’s true. Many in the black community are just as the old black people from back in the day used the word “color struck.” Woman like Lacy Schwartz and Rachel Dolezal with her fake self, are put on pedestals by black men. Shaun King look like the rapper T.I. to me. I don’t know what is going on with Shaun King but the cat is out the bag. There is a lot of weird secrecy stuff going on here. But i still believe the issue of this man’s racial identity is a tactic of the detractors of the BLM to distract from the more important issue of black people being brutalized and murdered. I hope BLM doesn’t get side tracked by this mess.
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@solesearch,
No, my question is not about what physical characteristics determine a person’s race.
My question was how people (and perhaps including you) assign a racial label to a person and maintain that label on a person for an long time without knowing about their actual background and perhaps even keeping that label after learning more about their actual background.
I don’t do that, but I would like to understand better how others think.
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Mary Burrell, you are right that this is being used to side track BLM. I’m just giving conjecture as to why a White person would give up whiteness and White privilege to become “Black”. There are major benefits for Black people with Caucasian phenotypes within the Black community and that is what probably motivated these 2 to make the switch.
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@Jadapoo1: Sadly, but it true about benefits for Black people with Caucasian phenotypes in the Black community. I hope this is not the case with Shaun King. I am hoping he is not as one poster said a Dolezal 2.0 that would be messed up. I want to believe Shaun King is sincere in his efforts as an activist and not a flake like Dolezal.
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*it’s^
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Maybe Shaun King feels he must protect his mother’s reputation but now that what ever they are trying to hide it’s now out and maybe he needs to tell people what is going on. If people think he is doing something crazy like Dolezal then they won’t trust him and thing he has some kind of flaky agenda going. I don’t know what his life story is but i am sure now he will be forced to tell it.
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@jadapoo1, thanks for summing up everything that I have been trying to get across to so many others about the whole “Dolezal-type” Black Community infiltration thing, and some of the primary motivations for them doing so..Add this with the fact that the Black Community is, let’s be real generally freakin’ cool, loving, and richly awesome it’s no wonder (as I’ve said before) that many, many cultures (Not just whites) imitate and/or cozy up to Blacks all over the world!
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@Jadapoo1
“To Whites Dolezal MIGHT be a 4, but to Black people she is a knock out, a definite 10: a blue eyed “Black girl” with long, bone straight, blond hair hanging down to her butt cheeks would be the alpha female in the Black community. She wouldn’t be able to beat the Black men off with a stick!!! Same goes for Shaun. Some Black women go crazy for a man with “good hair”. Also, Black people have a tendency to hand over leadership to people with more White features (thanks to 400 years of living under White supremacy).
People that look like Dolezal and King within the Black community are viewed as smarter, better and just plain ole worth more. Sad, but true. I truly think that’s why White people like them do this. They go from obscurity in one group to damn near celebrity status in another. They basically become “King of the Black People” WITH ALMOST NO EFFORT. It’s a White man’s fantasy come true. They are Tarzan and Sheera,Queen of the Jungle. Of course this is done with Black people’s consent. It couldn’t happen any other way.”
BINGO!!! You nailed it! I agree 100%!!! Couldn’t say it better myself. I’ve stated this fact over and over again. Especially to the brainwashed black people that keep defending these clowns. So many of our people are so mentally brain dead. But you summed up my sentiments exactly.
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Jefe,
So you don’t understand why people assign others to a racial category based on their appearance and not by how their parents identify themselves?
Race is one of the first things people notice(determine) upon seeing another person along with gender, or so I’ve read. It’s certainly one of the first things I notice. I don’t talk to every person I see and even the ones I do talk to its not enough to form a relationship where I would feel comfortable asking them about their racial/ethnic identity. So we assume. It’s automatic.
No offense, but I feel like Geordi LaForge trying to explain an aspect of humanity to Data.
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Solesearch,
I guess for me, especially for people who appear as racially or ethnically ambiguous as Shaun King or Bruno Mars, I don’t even hazard a guess as to their racial or ethnic identities until I know more about them, at least a bit of their family background or how they themselves might identify. If it is too uncomfortable to ask directly, I might at least find out something as, for example, what languages or dialects they use.
Ascertaining one’s racial or ethnic background might not necessarily even be that important when meeting people. What you are telling me is that you feel very uncomfortable with that ambiguity, so you will assign a racial label to them until that label changes. Only thing is, that label may still stick in your mind even in the presence of new information.
I disagree that what you are doing is a universal “aspect of humanity” as you purport. But it is apparently important to some people or in some places. As one’s racial label is very important in the USA, many (not all) do feel uncomfortable among more racially ambiguous people and will classify and label them to relieve that feeling.
Some people might do what Lacey Schwartz’s childhood friend did — think to themselves that looks wise, she looks like she might be part black but in her mind, Lacey was nothing other than Jewish.
What do you do when you encounter gender ambiguous people? Do you assign them first to either male or female? How is that affected by new information?
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jefe,
“What you are telling me is that you feel very uncomfortable with that ambiguity, so you will assign a racial label to them until that label changes. Only thing is, that label may still stick in your mind even in the presence of new information.”
I don’t think it makes me uncomfortable. I do pay attention to other people’s race mainly because I know they are paying attention to mine. I trust most non black people to be universally racist.
Shaun king looked white to me not racially ambiguous. Ive never really paid much attention to him. Just glanced at his picture, while on twitter. As far as seeing what language or dialects they speak…what does that have to do with race. Ive only read shaun king in english. Ive only heard bruno mars speak english. Plenty of different races speak english. I feel like you are projecting your issues with how society deals with racial identity onto me. Why do you care?
As far as the racial label sticking around…not in my experience. At least not in regards to black people I thought were white. I had a friend who I thought was mixed for a long time until one day he brought it up that people assume he is mixed, but both his parents were black. I have an aunt who looks biracial but is completely black as well so it wasn’t a mental leap for me. One of my coworkers is Indian/jewish but people walk up to him speaking Spanish all the time.
I wonder what race ppl will assume my daughter is. She might get the Spanish thing as well.
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Jefe,
Gender ambiguity is treated just like racial ambiguity…it is ambiguous so I wouldn’t know. What is ambiguous to one might be clear to another.
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I am trying to understand and see things from others’ points of view. I am not imposing my view on others.
Where was I critical? The only statement of disagreement was that what Solesearch stated as a universal “aspect of humanity” may not be so universal. Absolutely was not critical of anything else in any sense of the word.
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It is quite obvious that Schwartz is black or Afro-Latina. Her whole life story reminds of the animated hit show King of the Hill where Dale, an eccentric scrawny white man obsessed with conspiracy theory, doesn’t know his son is actually half Native American and that his wife, Nancy, has been cheating on him with a tall buff Native American man, John Redcorn. Just like Schwartz, Nancy lied to the neighborhood about her son’s much darker skin and darker hair in saying her husband dale had a “Jamaican grandmother”.
In the case of Shaun King, I don’t think it makes a difference whether his father was white or black because he grew up without his father. Even the white man on his birth certificate wasn’t around to raise him apparently. King claimed being black because black people accepted and told him he was black because of his ambiguous appearance. If anything, any outrage about King’s background stems from the idiocy and arbitrary nature of the one drop rule in America which is barely even a hundred years old. If King has literally a single drop of black blood that really makes a difference? Dolezal was a complete lie because she tried to claim she grew up with a black father even though she always knew she was white from staring at a blonde haired blue eyed face in the mirror since early childhood in Montana.
It’s sad that Schwartz was an outcast in the white community but was accepted and popular in the black community. But this is often how it is for light-skinned blacks with predominant caucasian features; especially women. Women who look like Schwartz with light skin and curly hair are often the most sought after types of black women in terms of dating and marriage amongst black men. But on the flip side, someone looking like this in a homogenous white community would be a complete outcast and looked at as a perpetual outsider. I’ve noticed that many half-black/half-white people who grow up in all white or nearly all-white environments have much bigger issues with self-hate and acceptance than half-black/half white people who grow up in communities with a significantly mixed to majority-black populations.
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Her “bad” hair became “good” hair. Her “dark” skin became “light” skin. The ugly duckling became a swan.
This text hints of colorism, of “brown paper bag” face control, and other bad things. It seems like the went from an “inferior white girl” to become a “superior black girl” and it was her main reason to admit that she was Black. I think you could omit that passage.
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@ George
She did benefit from colourism, so I put that in. But I put the adjectives in quotes to show that I was not speaking from that colouristic point of view.
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SanFranpsycho415
Very well said.
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@George
This text hints of colorism, of “brown paper bag” face control, and other bad things. It seems like the went from an “inferior white girl” to become a “superior black girl” and it was her main reason to admit that she was Black.
Exactly…
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@ Pumpkin
Good suggestion.
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