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. Berger's unusual experience--and his determination to search the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book. In it, Berger juxtaposes a series of brilliant short takes about the politics of race with personal and often disturbing vignettes about his own racial coming-of-age. These, in turn, are amplified by other voices and points of view: the words of ordinary people coping with fears and anxieties about race, and passages deftly drawn from the work of James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison, and other writers.