White lies

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. Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling opinions about race.