(Ebook) Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of A White Mother of Black Sons by Jane Lazarre ISBN 9780822374145, 0822374145 Available All Format
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pr aise for Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness
“Lazarre cuts close to the bone in this penetrating ‘story of the education of an
American woman.’ ”— Mary Carroll, Booklist
“In the end there is the great gift of being taken into the life of American black
culture. On the way there, this mother and child — the most intimate relation-
ships from infancy — has no public or political recognition for years. A kind of
love story and useful as well to people in interracial lives and families.”
— Grace Paley
“[A] compelling story of one mother’s honest efforts to reach across the chasm
between black and white America to comfort and guide her sons as they navi-
gate their way to adulthood and self-sufficiency.”
— Gregory Howard Williams, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Through the profoundly human caring of this book; its luminous beauty,
passionate authenticity, truth and power; its multi-lensed and sourced hard-
wrung wisdom — and yes, through the art with which it is written — we see,
feel, understand what we never have before, the ways of the Whiteness of
Whiteness; and we are challenged, enlarged, and enabled, as was Jane Lazarre,
to move Beyond. This revelation book, so capable of creating change-making
comprehension, is of crucial importance for our country’s self-knowledge and
vision.”— Tillie Olsen
“A novelist, essayist, and teacher, Lazarre presents her troubling but clear-eyed
vision of her life and times with incisiveness and grace.”
— John Gregory Brown, Chicago Tribune
“Jane Lazarre has written an extraordinary book. Beyond the Whiteness of White-
ness is a personal memoir, a lively tale of teaching and family life, humorous,
sad, and loving. Yet Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is also a profoundly
political book. Through maternal, autobiographical reflection, Jane Lazarre
confronts the white racism that has shaped American society and remains our
harshest tragedy and deepest challenge.”
— Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace
“A compassionate, compelling outpouring of anecdotal family stories and
confessionals . . . that fine-tune the reader’s awareness to racism in everyday
life. Lazarre’s voice is artful and measured, like a friend’s, and her prose is
thick with images. . . . Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness provides substantial
food for thought for both white and black perspectives on the murky issue
of race in America.”— Publishers Weekly
“This insightful Jewish mother opens our eyes to the pervasiveness of racism
in our culture — a reality that Jews and other whites can easily ignore.”
— Rabbi Rachel Cowan, author of Mixed Blessings: Marriage between
Christians and Jews
“Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness will be the classic Lazarre’s The Mother Knot
has become, a book in which a piece of American experience gets its full tell-
ing, a necessary book.”— Ann Snitow
“[Lazarre] . . . moves the reader. . . . When she writes, ‘I wish I could become
Black for my sons,’ she delves straight into the heart of her dilemma.”
— Helen Schulman, Elle
be yon d
the
w hiteness
of
w hiteness
beyond the whiteness
of whiteness
Jane Lazarre
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue xxvii
Notes 137
ack now ledgmen ts
I received much help in the writing of this book. Most of the writers
whose work has taught and inspired me are mentioned within the text,
but there are other friends and colleagues whose support has been crucial
to me in all stages of the writing.
Miriam Sivan, Ruth Charney, and the late Sara Ruddick were my earli-
est readers. I can never adequately acknowledge my appreciation for their
intelligent response, their encouragement, and their love.
Maureen Reddy’s book, Crossing the Color Line, about being the white
Irish mother of Black children was an inspiration to me, and Maureen’s
early reading, suggestions, and strong support greatly aided the course of
my own work.
During various stages of writing, I counted on trusted readers to help
me evaluate, change, or remain confident in what I had written. These
x Acknowledgments
with great generosity she has witnessed some of them become my own
stories to pass on. Her editing for accuracy of fact and rightness of tone
was invaluable.
My husband, Douglas Hughes White, listened to and read every chap-
ter, discussed every idea with me when I was uncertain or excited, and
gave the unfailing support he has given to me and my work over many
years. It is largely because of his belief in me that I had the temerity to
write this story in the first place.
More than anyone else, I want to thank my sons, Adam Lazarre-White
and Khary Lazarre-White. Through their example, their integrity in the
search for self, their companionship, and the struggles we have been
through together, I came to understand something about what is now
being called the American racial divide. Even as they pointed out that
treacherous geography, they provided the love and friendship that iden-
tify the crossing points and build the bridges we count on as we continue
our lives in this nation, which is so endangered by the racial conflict tear-
ing at its soul.
pr eface to t he
t w en t iet h a n ni v er sa ry edi t ion
In the original prologue to this memoir, written twenty years ago, I used
the words of Chinua Achebe as epigraph and talisman. Those words still
guide my work in memoir, fiction, and poetry; they form a direction for
me as I read, write, and live; they constitute a central belief, indeed, a
kind of faith.
“Imaginative identification is the opposite of indifference,” he tells us
in his essay “The Truth of Fiction.” “It is human connectedness at its
most intimate. . . . It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in
wisdom and humane conscience.”1
The relationship of the art of writing to self-discovery and humane
conscience (within which I include “politics” with a small p) has often
been contentious, derided, or denied, but for me it is a central aspect
xiv Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
On the night of June 17, 2015, a young white man entered the Eman-
uel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina,
where a group of parishioners were engaged in prayer study. The white
Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition xv
man who had been welcomed into the church massacred nine people,
including the minister of the church, Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Moth-
ers, grandmothers, sons, brothers, husbands, and wives were shot down
in cold blood, told before they died that they had to die because black
people were taking over the nation. One was allowed to live, to report to
the world the actions of the man who saw himself as a redeemer of the
white race. The shooter was arrested and indicted, and it soon became
known that he’d visited white supremacist historical and Internet sites
while cloaked in flags and insignia of Nazis, apartheid-era South Africa,
and white supremacist Rhodesia. Many white people, as well as people of
all backgrounds across the country, rallied with and supported the Afri-
can American citizens of Charleston. Yet the threadbare veil of national
racism—long standing and long denied—has now been torn to shreds,
our national disease shown to be unhealed, unrepaired, unreconciled.
Like many other Americans, I watched the funeral for Rev. Pinck-
ney on television, listened as the first African American president of the
United States —the president whom white racists have been threaten-
ing to kill since his election, questioning his very American-ness, try-
ing to defeat and humiliate him—Barack Obama delivered a eulogy
that was both a powerful indictment of racism and a meditation on the
concept of grace. Though I am not religious, through his words I came to
understand a new meaning of grace—the grace of holding on to a sense
of meaning in the face of moral chaos, that peace and goodness might
survive in a violent world, that the capacity for forgiveness, so astonish-
ingly and movingly expressed by members of the victims’ families facing
the murderer in court, is also within us all. In a nation many commenta-
tors rushed to define as “postracial” soon after Obama’s election in 2008,
now revealed as a nation yet to come to terms with what is being called
the “original sin” of slavery and segregation, the president stood still at
the podium and sang. In a subdued but emotional voice, he sang, at first
alone, then accompanied by many in the congregation, “Amazing Grace.”
In a recent column in the New York Times, Professor Nell Irvin Painter,
historian and writer, suggested that white allies of black liberation strug-
gles, still in progress, should call ourselves abolitionists, as white allies did
xvi Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
during slavery. This name feels accurate and appropriate now. Once again,
seeking grace, but also moral and historical clarity, I turn to Baldwin’s
prescient and brilliant essay, “Stranger in the Village.”
With all the Confederate flags coming down, with our always too
quickly abandoned vows to “talk about race” in our nation, even many
of the best of us white Americans remain in denial, wanting above all to
retain a sense of innocence and ignorance of historical and contemporary
realities.
“And anyone”—Baldwin again—“who insists on remaining in a
state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a
monster.”4
American man in the mid-1960s, when marriage between races was still
illegal in many states in this nation. Now my husband of forty-eight years,
Douglas White, has encouraged, taught, and helped me in many ways as
I pursued the theme of race and African American culture in my work
as a writer and a teacher. When I married him, I also fell in love in some
ways with his whole family, at the center of which was his powerful and
magnetic mother. She helped us raise our sons and contributed in many
ways to this memoir, telling me her stories and allowing me to retell them
in my own words. Still a dear and constant friend to me, at ninety-one
years old she can walk four miles with an ease I cannot manage.
When I found the precise words for the title of this book—Beyond
the Whiteness of Whiteness, a different turn on Ralph Ellison’s famous
phrase—I meant to suggest the possibility of rejecting willful innocence
and persistent ignorance of history, of being oblivious, out of callousness
or bigotry or fear, to the history and legacy of American slavery and gen-
erations of racial oppression continuing. I was recording a transformation
in consciousness—a shift, even a sea change, formed by the unique inti-
macies of motherhood, but also by long and serious study.
So in another sense, this is a story about a writer-teacher. Between
1984 and 2006 I taught fiction, memoir, and courses in African American
literature at the Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York
City. Ironically, the place that gave me the opportunity to learn and teach
this literary tradition, so central and influential in American literature,
was also a place I ultimately left due to unresolvable arguments about
race. Whether curriculum, faculty, and recruitment of students should or
should not include attention to the history of race in America continues to
be a debate and challenge at all levels of education; it is a subject which, in
2015, is being discussed and argued widely again. Still, for almost twenty
years I was able to learn from colleagues, students, and my own studies
about how American culture and history have been profoundly influ-
enced by African American writers—their insights, their wrestling with
questions of American identities and the nature of freedom, the music
and cadences of a literary tradition that continues to inspire and grow.
The story of teaching undergraduates and learning from them is in-
separable from my story of being a mother of black sons. The internal
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