About the Book
"I am Black," Jane Lazarre's son tells her. "I have a Jewish mother, but I am not 'biracial.' That term is meaningless to me." She understands, she says-but he tells her, gently, that he doesn't think so, that she can't understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre's memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture. Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one's own experience-an overlapping of the stories of one's own life and the world.
Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre's is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons' and husband's experience as Black Americans-an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor's unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy-or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion. With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author's delight at being accepted into her husband's family and attests to the power of motherhood.
And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Prologue xiii 1. The Richmond Museum of the Confederacy 1 2. Color Blind: The Whiteness of Whiteness 21 3. Passing Over 53 4. Reunions, Retellings, Refrains 99 5. A Color with No Precise Name 125 Notes 137
About the Author :
Jane Lazarre is on the Faculty of Eugene Lang College at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Mother Knot and The Mother Knot, both published by Duke University Press.
Review :
"An important affirmation of a white woman's love of her black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over." - Alice Walker "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 "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 of relationships 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" "Jane Lazarre has written an extraordinary book. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness 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 "This is a passionate, provocative and moving narrative that should be on every American's reading list. Jane Lazarre writes from an angle of vision that seems completely missing from the fractured and deeply troubled discourse about race in America. Her honesty and courage in telling this story is as instructive as it is praiseworthy, compelling us to think and feel differently." - Sekou Sundiata, author of The Circle is Unbroken Is a Hard Bop "The operation is over, and on the operating table, an anaesthetised black boy is trying to wake; he flails his arms. What the white doctors and nurses see is a dangerous black male and , afraid, they deep putting him back under, to pacify him. Jane Lazarre is the boy's white mother, who wishes she and her sons could awake from the nightmare of American racism. Step by step, she begins by showing the doctors how to treat her beloved boy as a patient, not a threat. In this wonderful book, Lazarre traces unflinchingly all her family's rich, unfolding lives - displaced somewhere between American Blackness and American whiteness.' 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 telling, a necessary book." - Ann Snitow "A terrifically courageous piece of work. I cannot think of another text written by a white woman that is like it, and I cannot imagine one which would address these complex issues with greater lucidity, grace, intelligence, and love." - Claire B. Potter, Wesleyan University "A very powerful book, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness breaks new ground in using the memoir genre to examine constructs of race and the history of racism in the U.S. from the perspective of a white feminist mother of black sons. Lazarre not only joins the conversation on race being carried on by hooks, West, Gates, et al., but also pushes that conversation in a new and very important direction." - Maureen Reddy, author of Crossing the Color Line
