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

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