Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness

"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 com