Description
“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.” In this moving memoir, Jane Lazarre, the white Jewish mother of now adult Black sons, offers a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America as she tells the story of how she came to understand the experiences of her African American husband, their growing sons, and their extended family. Recounting her education, as a wife, mother, and scholar-teacher, into the realities of African American life, Lazarre shows how although racism and white privilege lie at the heart of American history and culture, any of us can comprehend the experience of another through empathy and learning.
This Twentieth Anniversary Edition features a new preface, in which Lazarre’s elegy for Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others, reminds us of the continued resonance of race in American life. As #BlackLivesMatter gains momentum, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is more urgent and essential than ever.
- Pages: 184
- Published: April 2016
Blurbs
“An important affirmation of a white woman’s love of her black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over.”
Alice Walker
“This is a passionate, provocative, and moving narrative that should be on every American’s reading list.”
Sekou Sundiata
“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
“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, we 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.”
Tillie Olsen
“Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness will be the classic Lazarre’s Mother Knot has become, a book in which a piece of American experience gets its full telling, a necessary book.”
Ann Snitow
“…breaks new ground in using the memoir genre to examine constructs of race and the history of racism in the United States…”
Maureen T. Reddy
“This insightful Jewish mother opens our eyes to the pervasiveness of racism in our culture – a reality that Jews and other whites easily ignore.”
Rabbi Rachel Cowan
“An illuminating book…offers invaluable insights not just for those working to raise children in biracial families, but for all who would like to understand the notion of whiteness in order to see beyond it and reach for fairness.”
Boyd Zenner, Women’s Review of Books
“A novelist, essayist and teacher, Lazarre presents her troubling but clear-eyes vision of her life and times with incisiveness and grace.”
John Gregory Brown, Chicago Tribune
“A beautifully written, deeply thoughtful journey into the worlds of self and other.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Lazarre’s voice is artful and measured…substantial food for thought for both white and black perspectives on the murky issue of race in America.”
Publishers Weekly
“Powerful, moving and beautifully written…”
Richard L. Zweigenhaft, Greensboro News and Record
