ANTIWHITENESS.ORG

This page summarizes Berger’s background and his book White Lies for readers tracking memoir-driven scholarship that treats White identity as a problem to be exposed and unraveled.

Background

Berger grew up Jewish in the 1960s in a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican public housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—one of the few fair-skinned children in the development. He described himself as hypersensitized to race in that setting. His father was a Jewish liberal who admired Martin Luther King Jr.; his mother was a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew whose attitudes, in Berger’s own account, were sharply anti-Black. That split household—liberal paternal ideal versus maternal bigotry—became raw material for his later writing on how racial meanings operate inside families and how American color lines assign Jews ambiguous places in the country’s Black–White scheme.

He earned a B.A. from Hunter College (1978) and a Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY (1988). He taught at Hunter, became a leading curator and critic, and spent much of his career at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he was research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. He curated major exhibitions on race and American visual culture (including For All the World to See at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture), wrote widely in the art press, and produced the long-running New York Times Lens column “Race Stories.” He died at 63 in Copake, New York; obituaries cited heart failure complicated by presumed COVID-19.

White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (1999)

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the book is part memoir, part collage: short chapters (themes such as rage, fear, envy, beauty) mix autobiographical vignettes with quotation and commentary. Promotional copy billed it as debunking “myths and false assumptions about race in America” and encouraging readers to confront their own “complex and often troubling opinions about race.” The project fits squarely in 1990s whiteness studies: treat Whiteness as a racial category with myths that must be dismantled, and put Berger’s own complicity and ambivalence—as the genre demands—on display alongside other voices in the field.

Historian David Roediger described the book as gathering “classic accounts of what whiteness means” and pairing expert voices on White identity with “bursts of poignant autobiography” that “destabiliz[e] racial certainties.” The volume was a finalist for Harvard’s Horace Mann Bond Book Award and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards.

Themes relevant to antiwhiteness

• Frames ordinary Americans treated as White in U.S. racial politics—including Berger’s Jewish family—as carriers of racial myth that must be confessed and dissected for public consumption.
• Uses intimate memoir to generalize about Whiteness as duplicitous (“white lies”), a move that invites readers to treat White people’s stated motives with systematic suspicion.
• Helped normalize the exhibition and literature of “White confession” as a genre of respectable racial politics in the academy and museum world.

Further reading

• Berger, Maurice. White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Neil Genzlinger, “Maurice Berger, Curator Outspoken About Race, Is Dead at 63,” The New York Times, March 26, 2020: nytimes.com
• Felicia R. Lee, “Facing Down His Color As a Path To Privilege,” The New York Times, May 5, 1999 (profile tied to White Lies): nytimes.com
• Biographical overview: Wikipedia: Maurice Berger