title: White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness
author:  Maurice Berger 
description: Maybe this is what President Clinton had in mind when he tried to kickstart a national discussion on race. Berger's book is subjective, fragmented and, most appealingly, devoid of piety. The son of a dark-skinned but racist Sephardic Jewish mother and a pale-skinned father who admired but didn't know blacks, Berger was raised in a mostly black New York City housing project, where he found himself navigating the shoals of identity and allegiance. In this book, he juxtaposes his memories and observations with a collage of interviews, anecdotes and quotes from other writers?many of them black?about the way we mythologize race. In some ways, this is a particularly good subject for such an approach, since attitudes about race are so much a matter of individual perspective and experience. And his broadening of focus allows Berger to encompass some potent voices, from the dreadlocked black person mistaken for Whoopi Goldberg to the white-seeming black artist Adrian Piper, whose Calling Card 1, a work of art and functional calling card, alerts people to racist remarks. But the format also has its limitations. Berger's treatment of affirmative action doesn't give enough credit to strong criticisms, and the story of his university education, in which black intellectuals were slighted, isn't followed by acknowledgment of today's multiculturalism. (He now teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York.) But Berger deserves credit?and readers?for coming up with an idiosyncratic way to think publicly about the vexing problems of race and racism. <BR>Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness
  
  The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness
  Edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen,
  Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray
  duke university press
  Durham & London 2001
  
  ∫ 2001 Duke University Press
  All rights reserved
  Printed in the United States of
  America on acid-free paper $
  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
  Typeset in Scala by Keystone
  Typesetting, Inc.
  Library of Congress Cataloging-
  in-Publication Data and
  additional copyright information
  appear on the last printed
  page of this book.
  
  Contents
  Acknowledgments vii
  Introduction 1
  Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg,
  Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray
  Universal Freckle, or How I Learned to Be White 25
  Dalton Conley
  ‘‘The Souls of White Folks’’ 43
  Mab Segrest
  The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness 72
  Ruth Frankenberg
  White Racial Projects 97
  Howard Winant
  The ‘‘Morphing’’ Properties of Whiteness 113
  Troy Duster
  ‘‘White Devils’’ Talk Back: What Antiracists
  Can Learn from Whites in Detroit 138
  John Hartigan