Too often, many of us in the mixed-race community seek to redefine ourselves as multiracial, but at the same time we stick to the same binary social construct that we're supposed to have outgrown. We proudly declare our "mixed-ness" but then attach other descriptors like "black multiracial" and, more frequently as of late, "white-multiracial". We think these terms to be necessary, somehow, to show our own cultural allegiances.

A great deal of scholarship has gone into defining what American black culture is, so when someone employs that term, we tend to have a good idea of what they are talking about. The collective experience of people of African descent in the United States has given them the equivalent of an ethnic identity, not unlike being Italian-American or German-American. However, not as much scholarship has gone into defining "whiteness". Americans of European descent are supposed to have a specific country of ancestral origin, so to claim "whiteness" (as opposed to a specific European ancestry) often appears to be an identity based primarily in negation of anything that would bespeak a 'racial taint'. This lack of scholarship promotes a lack of understanding, and this lack of understanding is fracturing the multiracial community into component parts. This new labeling practice is divisive and foolish, and is every bit as destructive as believing in race to begin with.

One of the more intriguing things about Maurice Berger's book White Lies is that his search for a meaning in whiteness supports the idea that race is a fallacy. He writes of "...the mutability of race, the evidence that terms like 'black' and "white' are imprecise at best, living proof that miscegenation has blurred the racial boundaries of almost every one of us, confirmation that race itself is socially and culturally constructed." The book jacket gives us this capsule view of Berger's background. "Maurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who worshipped Martin Luther King Jr., his mother a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew who hated black people. Berger himself was one of the few white kids in his Lower East Side housing project."

His personal experiences and anecdotes, combined with the deft quoting of both ordinary folk and professional writers, bring to light the little details of race that some of us find easier to ignore. He illustrates a deep awareness of the way ideas of race not only harm those against whom they are directed, but poison those who put their faith in their own racial superiority. I found White Lies to be well-written, insightful, and genuinely thought-provoking. Perhaps the more we examine the previously exclusive nature of whiteness to the extent that we have the previously inclusive nature of blackness, we will all become more eager to shed the trappings of racial identities for something more substantial and meaningful.

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