Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Lacey
Speaker 1: Schwartz was born into a Jewish family who lived in Woodstock,
Speaker 1: New York. Her twenty sixteen documentary, Little White Lye, begins
Speaker 1: with glimpses of home movies Lacy as a young child
Speaker 1: surrounded by her family. This is in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Her mom is fair with big blue eyes. Her dad
Speaker 1: is dark haired, intense looking, brooding. Actually, her parents look
Speaker 1: kind of cool, hippieish, like a young James Taylor and
Speaker 1: Carly Simon, which is appropriate since this is Woodstock. And
Speaker 1: then there's Lacy. What the viewer notices instantly is that
Speaker 1: the child is black, but no one in her family
Speaker 1: seems to notice or take in this fact. I can't
Speaker 1: stress how obvious it would be to anyone looking at
Speaker 1: this family that there is no way little Lacy, a
Speaker 1: beautiful girl, was caramel skin, dark eyes, kinky hair, and
Speaker 1: decidedly African American features, is the daughter of her two
Speaker 1: very white parents. I mean, maybe she's the daughter of
Speaker 1: one of them, but both out of the question. Except
Speaker 1: this is a story in which what people wish to
Speaker 1: believe will themselves to believe, becomes what they actually do
Speaker 1: believe the story of a family who raises their only
Speaker 1: child to believe that she is something other than who
Speaker 1: she is. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: secrets that are kept from us, secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and secrets we keep from ourselves. So did you have
Speaker 1: any sense at all growing up that something didn't quite
Speaker 1: make sense? Absolutely? I mean I solely because the way
Speaker 1: I loved from the time I was very very um.
Speaker 1: I either have memories of being questioned about the way
Speaker 1: I love and why I looked the way I did
Speaker 1: because I did seemed to like fit in with my
Speaker 1: family and surrounding and I looked different than other people,
Speaker 1: And it also became almost like a little bit of
Speaker 1: family lore that you know, the first vacation, at least
Speaker 1: I was aware that we went on as a family
Speaker 1: and we went to Puerto Rico, and as an infant,
Speaker 1: you know, people thought I was Puerto Rican. So it
Speaker 1: was always very clear that people thought I looked different
Speaker 1: from my parents. I know something about growing up with
Speaker 1: a profound disconnect between who I was told I was
Speaker 1: and the truth that stared back at me in the
Speaker 1: mirror every day. A couple of years ago. As nothing
Speaker 1: more than a whim, I spit into a plastic file
Speaker 1: and sent a d n A sample to one of
Speaker 1: those genetic testing companies. When I got my results, I
Speaker 1: found out that my dad wasn't my dad. Half of
Speaker 1: my family tree was locked off at the roots. The
Speaker 1: person I thought I was was not the person I
Speaker 1: actually was, at least not biologically. At a time when
Speaker 1: I was in the midst of my freak out, a
Speaker 1: friend told me about Lacey's film. I watched mesmerized as
Speaker 1: a beaming black girl held the Torah on her bot mitzvah,
Speaker 1: her parents proudly looking on as she read from the
Speaker 1: Hagada at the pass Over table with her family, as
Speaker 1: she laughed as a toddler on her mother's lap. My
Speaker 1: family knew who they were, and they defined who I was,
Speaker 1: the adult, Lacey narrates. I was raised in an Orthodox
Speaker 1: Jewish family on my father's side. It was a lineage
Speaker 1: that stretched back into the shettles of Lithuania and Poland.
Speaker 1: My cousins all look unmistakably Jewish. In fact, some of
Speaker 1: them wear the black hats and long beards of Hassad's.
Speaker 1: I grew up in a Kosher home, spoke fluent Hebrew,
Speaker 1: and attended a yeshiva at Jewish day school. And every
Speaker 1: day of my life I was told that I didn't
Speaker 1: look Jewish. I was very fair and blue eyed. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't just that I didn't look Jewish. It was
Speaker 1: that I did look like something else, like I came
Speaker 1: from another part of the world altogether. But in my family,
Speaker 1: we laughed off this strange genetic twist of fate that
Speaker 1: had me looking like Swiss miss wandering over from the
Speaker 1: Alps and into the dusty shuttle. It was a source
Speaker 1: of amusement and hilarity. I mean, when I was three
Speaker 1: years old, I was the child in the Kodak Christmas poster. Literally,
Speaker 1: I was the little girl wishing the entire world a
Speaker 1: merry Christmas. As the end credits rolled in Lacy's film,
Speaker 1: I turned to my husband Michael, so I said, the
Speaker 1: level of denial in her family was really extreme, not
Speaker 1: like what happened in mine. Michael paused and looked at me. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: pretty much the same, he said. There's all different kinds
Speaker 1: the secrets of families kind of, but a lot of
Speaker 1: times it's because people's existence. They're like stigmatized. People don't
Speaker 1: want to talk about having affair, they don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about being inter at all, they don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that maybe they are partning before
Speaker 1: our marriage. There's all different kinds of things that people
Speaker 1: lie about, absolutely, and we're also living in a moment
Speaker 1: in time where a lot of those lies or very
Speaker 1: closely kept secrets are tumbling out because of the combination
Speaker 1: of the Internet and DNA testing, where people find out
Speaker 1: all sorts of things that were meant to be kept
Speaker 1: secrets to the grave. Yeah. No, absolutely mean. I have
Speaker 1: a bunch of friends through through genetic testing, the kind
Speaker 1: of over the kind of generic testing, has found out
Speaker 1: that they are not their parents child. There was within
Speaker 1: my family a kind of the story that was told
Speaker 1: was that my father had a dark skinned Sicilian grandfather
Speaker 1: who I had never met, had passed away about her
Speaker 1: Warren by looking at family photos, that was who I
Speaker 1: looked like. It was darker as features and c around,
Speaker 1: and that it was kind of its idea like re
Speaker 1: set of gene And that was a story that was
Speaker 1: repeated and kind of was passed on and would come
Speaker 1: up at various moments, so I would say that, you know,
Speaker 1: for me and becau's really worth knowing that, in in terms
Speaker 1: of my own time, I was denial that my denial
Speaker 1: was very much learned, you know, it was something that
Speaker 1: was passed on to me. Lazie grows up in a
Speaker 1: self described bubble in Woodstock. Despite its fame, it's a
Speaker 1: small town, mostly white. No one really challenges her or
Speaker 1: her parents about what is glaringly obvious. But then, as
Speaker 1: bubbles do, hers begins to Expand we're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break. We'll be back in a moment. When
Speaker 1: Lazy enters middle school and then high school, she's bussed
Speaker 1: to a much larger town, and it's then that she
Speaker 1: begins to get the questions and deep down to question herself.
Speaker 1: There's a moment in your film, if I were call
Speaker 1: it correctly, where there's a sense that the African American
Speaker 1: kids in that school are looking at you like you're
Speaker 1: one of us, Like what's up that this isn't making
Speaker 1: you know, like we we recognize you exactly. Part of
Speaker 1: that was understanding how you know, I had come to
Speaker 1: convince myself to believe that I would still I kind
Speaker 1: of push back a rationalize against it, but I would
Speaker 1: say that probably around high school is when kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: or maybe even middle school was when I realized that
Speaker 1: you dine you the truth but wasn't willing to admit it.
Speaker 1: And I think I went through most of my adolescens
Speaker 1: in that phase. The phase Lacy is talking about here
Speaker 1: has been coined by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas as the
Speaker 1: unthought known, what we know deep down but cannot bring
Speaker 1: ourselves to think. Sometimes we spend our whole lives in
Speaker 1: the unthought known, and sometimes life intervenes and we're confronted
Speaker 1: with knowledge that we can no longer bury from ourselves.
Speaker 1: When Lazy is sixteen, her parents, who had been having issues,
Speaker 1: split up. This fissure in the foundation of her family
Speaker 1: is the first step in a fissure inside of Lacey.
Speaker 1: She can't articulate it, but she knows that something doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense. The fall of her senior year, when she
Speaker 1: applies to colleges, she leaves the box that would identify
Speaker 1: her ethnicity unchecked. Back in those days, I don't think
Speaker 1: college is still do this. Lacey would have sent a
Speaker 1: photograph along with her application. So Lacey is admitted to
Speaker 1: Georgetown as a black student. Do you remember anything about
Speaker 1: that moment? Was that a conscious choice? Was that a
Speaker 1: moment of I really just don't even know what to
Speaker 1: put here? Or you tell me, like you know, it
Speaker 1: almost feels like a challenge, like you tell me who
Speaker 1: who am? I? And I've spent to a fair amount
Speaker 1: of time analyzing this and discussing it with the people
Speaker 1: that were close to me. But I think in retrospect
Speaker 1: that what I was, even if it was, as you said,
Speaker 1: the the unknown truth or what was that you said,
Speaker 1: what was that crazy? The unsought known, the unsought known?
Speaker 1: And that was really so my parents went around was
Speaker 1: six team a junior year in high school, right, So
Speaker 1: I was sending in my applications more or less that
Speaker 1: summer fall afterwards. At that point I was really my
Speaker 1: bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down at
Speaker 1: that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was
Speaker 1: very much prioritizing the issues I was dealing with my life.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, largely around I wish with
Speaker 1: one person, a guy that I was dating at that time,
Speaker 1: who had already gone off to college, who he himself
Speaker 1: was also bi racial black and had come from the
Speaker 1: same sound as me and was just saying, like, yo,
Speaker 1: it's one thing that you think walking around in this
Speaker 1: relatively small community that we grew up in and saying
Speaker 1: that you're white or you know, identifying as such. But
Speaker 1: you know, when you go out into the bigger world,
Speaker 1: like people are going to laugh at you, like it
Speaker 1: doesn't add up. And so I was conscious enough to
Speaker 1: know at that point that there were things that weren't
Speaker 1: adding up, But I wasn't prepared to really do the
Speaker 1: deep dive at that point under my you know, but
Speaker 1: still the time my parents root, I wasn't in the
Speaker 1: proximity of my parents ready to do that diving a
Speaker 1: cigarette like, well, then who am I if I am
Speaker 1: not the daughter of both of my parents. Lacy goes
Speaker 1: off to college and begins to try on her new identity,
Speaker 1: living in what she describes as a racial closet. She
Speaker 1: doesn't say a word to her mother, she doesn't say
Speaker 1: a word to her father. It isn't until she's been
Speaker 1: away from home for her entire freshman year that she
Speaker 1: broaches the subject with her mother for the first time.
Speaker 1: So I went to my mother and was life with
Speaker 1: then I wanted as a truth, like why do I
Speaker 1: the way I did, and my mother, as she tends to,
Speaker 1: kind of comes in haunt and took a whisle me
Speaker 1: pushing her for her to finally kind of sit down
Speaker 1: and really have the conversation about what occurred around me
Speaker 1: being conceived and how likely it was that my father
Speaker 1: was not my biological boma. So by the time I
Speaker 1: found out and really fundamentally again, it was more a
Speaker 1: confirmation process than it was a revelatory process, because by
Speaker 1: the time I went to my mother and stop to her,
Speaker 1: I was ready just to have the imformation firm so
Speaker 1: I could confirm my own identity and be able to
Speaker 1: figure out who I was. Lacy's mother does not want
Speaker 1: to talk about it. At first, she denies it, but
Speaker 1: eventually she tells Lazy the truth her mom had had
Speaker 1: a long affair was an African American man named Rodney,
Speaker 1: a friend of the family that Lacy has known growing
Speaker 1: up and who Lacy resembles to such a point that
Speaker 1: friends have pointed it out, and so kind of at
Speaker 1: that point she shared the information and shared what is
Speaker 1: basically outline it. It's not that she had had a
Speaker 1: relationship with my biological father, and there was a very
Speaker 1: good chance that I was to his child, and for me,
Speaker 1: I mean again, based on the side that I really
Speaker 1: physically looked fairly somewhere at him, it seemed pretty obvious
Speaker 1: what the truth was. Once Lazy has the truth of
Speaker 1: her identity confirmed, you'd think she'd pay her dad a
Speaker 1: visit go talk to him. Lazy's mom tells her that
Speaker 1: the two of them have never discussed it. My parents
Speaker 1: never talked about the truth to this day. They haven't
Speaker 1: actually really pull out had a conversation about the truth
Speaker 1: for a long time, obviously because my mother. But now
Speaker 1: at this point, my father guys made it clear to
Speaker 1: her that he doesn't want to sit down and talk
Speaker 1: it out, that he just doesn't want to talk to
Speaker 1: her about it. And they had never had a moment
Speaker 1: with each other when you were born or in your childhood.
Speaker 1: There wasn't that when when he moved out, like when
Speaker 1: they were pretty much in the processive him moving out.
Speaker 1: One one moment he said, you know, I know, Lazy
Speaker 1: not my biological child, and the point her, you know,
Speaker 1: she cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: But they didn't actually have a competition like that was
Speaker 1: the expect of the competition. How long after the hemming
Speaker 1: and hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting
Speaker 1: to you that it was possible. How long before you
Speaker 1: then ended up speaking with your father about it? A decade?
Speaker 1: A decade? We're going to pause for a moment. You know,
Speaker 1: Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I
Speaker 1: had found out the truth about me and my dad
Speaker 1: while he was still alive. Now it's easy for me
Speaker 1: to wish I could talk to him, to wish I
Speaker 1: could ask him what he suspected or whether he flat
Speaker 1: out new and if he did know whether it mattered.
Speaker 1: But would I have been able to sit my father down,
Speaker 1: look him in the eye and have that moment into
Speaker 1: saying I am not your biological daughter. For me, I
Speaker 1: think it was really about living for a long time
Speaker 1: in fear that if I spoke the truth about my race,
Speaker 1: which was directly linked to my fraternity, that I would
Speaker 1: be at risk of losing my father, And so I
Speaker 1: always telling my father was my father, and I was
Speaker 1: scared of losing him, And it took me a while
Speaker 1: to come to accept that I actually only now realized
Speaker 1: that I probably was never really at risk of losing him,
Speaker 1: But I actually had to accept that I had to
Speaker 1: be willing to move forward regardless of the potential of
Speaker 1: losing him, because I couldn't live my life under these
Speaker 1: secrets and be able to move for with my life
Speaker 1: in a healthy manner. And then after I was came
Speaker 1: to that realization and acceptance and actually didn't move forward,
Speaker 1: I came to realize that when I kind of sent
Speaker 1: my own boundaries and owned my own truth, that in fact,
Speaker 1: my father was fundamentally still going to be there. Like
Speaker 1: I literally thought there one or two things was going
Speaker 1: to happen. Either he and I were going to totally
Speaker 1: like sit down and working all out beyond the same page,
Speaker 1: or we were going to have nothing to do with
Speaker 1: each other. And I didn't realize that there was a
Speaker 1: middle ground between those two, that we could actually have
Speaker 1: live our own separate realities but still being in each
Speaker 1: other's lives, which is what exact happened. And it also
Speaker 1: took me a while to really accept the fact that
Speaker 1: nobody except for me was going to actually bring up
Speaker 1: these conversations that in and of itself was something I
Speaker 1: had to come to terms with. It's like why won't
Speaker 1: they whether it was like send the family and my father,
Speaker 1: why don't think forward was having the conversation but realizing that,
Speaker 1: you know, this is my life and I couldn't be
Speaker 1: a victim within my own life, and so if this
Speaker 1: was something I needed to do, I needed to take
Speaker 1: responsibility and do it. The discovery of such a massive
Speaker 1: secret that was always hiding in plain sight is one thing.
Speaker 1: The work of metabolizing it is another. It isn't easy
Speaker 1: to digest a new truth about yourself that changes the
Speaker 1: very nature of your identity, and in Lacey's case, this
Speaker 1: is complicated by the fact that there's a politicized racial
Speaker 1: identification going on. She has to reconcile being black with
Speaker 1: a lifetime of believing she was white. She has to
Speaker 1: come to an understanding of what it means to be
Speaker 1: both black and Jewish. If you think about it, identity
Speaker 1: is usually something that we're born with and grow into,
Speaker 1: but what about when it isn't so. Lacey embarks on
Speaker 1: making her documentary first thinking that she's going to explore
Speaker 1: dual identity, what she calls two iconic identities, being black
Speaker 1: and being Jewish, But as she begins working on the film,
Speaker 1: she realizes that while it's a good idea. She doesn't
Speaker 1: quite know what the story is until she realizes that
Speaker 1: she and her family is the story. And one of
Speaker 1: the things I think is most interesting about this is
Speaker 1: that the art form Lazy chooses film is a visual, clear,
Speaker 1: direct medium, one in which Lacey would be pointing the
Speaker 1: camera at her parents who never ever wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about this, and essentially pushed them to talk. Like, you
Speaker 1: didn't make an opera out of it. You make a
Speaker 1: book out of it. You to make a play out
Speaker 1: of it, or a poem out of it, or a
Speaker 1: podcast out of it. You made a film. It's like,
Speaker 1: in a way, what it feels like to me is
Speaker 1: you were saying, I'm going to pin this down as
Speaker 1: much as it can be pinned down, because it wasn't
Speaker 1: pinned down for all of those years. It really is
Speaker 1: like a coming out product. You know. I had literally
Speaker 1: lived in regi Ploset where it was out and about
Speaker 1: in my world and kind of you know, identifying a
Speaker 1: certain way that I would come home and I with
Speaker 1: whitewash and my existence and I would tell France, you know,
Speaker 1: remember my we don't talk about me being black at
Speaker 1: home from the just I had to live it and
Speaker 1: therefore capturing the living of it. Just made sense to
Speaker 1: me just to go through it and just hold myself
Speaker 1: accountable to really not only living through it, but then
Speaker 1: actually going back and processing it. And this just felt
Speaker 1: like the way that made the most soundsels I was
Speaker 1: really living out experience, and doing a documentary was really
Speaker 1: capturing what was happening in real time at that moment.
Speaker 1: Right Also, it gives you permission and forces you in
Speaker 1: a certain way to ask the tough questions to go there,
Speaker 1: to keep your mother in the chair, to have that conversation,
Speaker 1: to have that conversation with your father um which no
Speaker 1: other art form would afford you. Until I uncovered my
Speaker 1: family's secrets, I was never going to learn to live
Speaker 1: with my joy identity being black and Jewish, and I
Speaker 1: was never going to be able to internally integrate my
Speaker 1: identities until I was willing to go through the process
Speaker 1: of moving past my family secrets. I suppose that it's
Speaker 1: core this is a story about the extraordinary a capacity
Speaker 1: that we human beings have to believe what we want
Speaker 1: to believe, to bury our own secrets, even from ourselves,
Speaker 1: and at the same time the capacity we also have
Speaker 1: to shed those secrets to move past them and become
Speaker 1: holy ourselves. You now have five year old twins, is
Speaker 1: that right? So in your family life, how does being
Speaker 1: black and Jewish play into the way that you think
Speaker 1: about raising your kids and dual identity and is this
Speaker 1: kind of an ongoing story in a way for you
Speaker 1: part of what you think about as a mom as
Speaker 1: having kids of your own now totally, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think I'm infertan ways. I think I'm very typical, which
Speaker 1: is that like identified with the Jewish, I've always practiced
Speaker 1: in my own way my whole life. But now I'm
Speaker 1: figuring out what that means in my family and my husband,
Speaker 1: who was raised in Baptist Church. We are raising the
Speaker 1: kids Jewish, but we're figuring out what that means, you know,
Speaker 1: my husband is not Jewish. But also to know who
Speaker 1: they are on every piece of it. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that for us the thing that helps us that
Speaker 1: our world are not divided in that space. Like my
Speaker 1: in law is even expressed, you know interest in coming
Speaker 1: to synagogue. We have a church with them on some
Speaker 1: of the big holidays. I think that you know, we
Speaker 1: wanted to know who they are completely and totally, but
Speaker 1: we're still figuring it out. I mean, I think everybody
Speaker 1: is figuring out. Previously, when I wasn't like kind of
Speaker 1: speaking my truth and owning and and I hadn't had
Speaker 1: the conversation with my family, I lived with a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety about things being revealed. And you can see
Speaker 1: some of those moments within the film and the tension
Speaker 1: that I was living with and I don't live with
Speaker 1: them anymore. That is actually gone from my life, that
Speaker 1: that anxiety has been relieved, And so there are a
Speaker 1: very physical difference in terms of how I lived my
Speaker 1: life now and how I was putting it before, Like
Speaker 1: the apprehension and anxiety around this secret being will be
Speaker 1: able to talk about our reference is now gone, and
Speaker 1: I feel that physical difference. I'd like to thank my
Speaker 1: guest Lacey Schwartz for sharing her story with us today.
Speaker 1: You can find out more about her documentary at Little
Speaker 1: White Lie. The film dot com. Family Secrets is an
Speaker 1: I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer,
Speaker 1: Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and
Speaker 1: Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a
Speaker 1: family Secret, you'd like to share. You can get in
Speaker 1: touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast
Speaker 1: dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram
Speaker 1: at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and
Speaker 1: Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's FAMI Secret Spot. For
Speaker 1: more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com