Product 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'. 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 characterised 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1798672 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

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

Tillie Olsen
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.

Alice Walker
An important affirmation of a white woman's love of her black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over.

Customer Reviews

This book is incredible!
Jane Lazarre echoes my own thoughts and feelings when she writes of the "invisibility of whiteness". I too am a white woman married to a black man. I will never feel the firsthand racism that my husband or our children will feel. Like the author, I can slip away from racism at any time, alone on the street, I am simply a white woman, with my family I become an oddity, something for strangers to stare at. By myself, my whiteness makes me invisible. Jane Lazarre explains this in a compelling, moving manner. This book will definatly open the eyes of many a reader.

a moving and cutting edge book on race in the U.S.
I picked up Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness because I was curious. I couldn't put it down because I was overwhelmed. As an Italian-American, I have spent a great deal of time considering the construction of whiteness and its effect on ethnicity, culture and race. Many of the pieces I read on whiteness are written with the intent to complicate an ethnicity, to make it more than "just white". There has not been enough conversation on the complexities of whiteness and white privilege. Jane Lazarre does what most of the other books haven't done: writes about whiteness after developing an intimate relationship with Blackness. This puts her in a very different position than someone, like me, whose whiteness is often understood only in relation to other white people. I read this book and found myself trembling. Race is a subject that I spend a lot of time thinking about, writing about, and wondering about. What this book managed to do was get me past what I think I know and pull me into another place entirely. A bone body place. This book needs to be read by those whites who say that racism has melted away in the U.S. and by those whites who think they have read and understood as much as they need to. This book will change you.