“A terrifically courageous piece of work. I cannot think of another text written by a white woman that is like it, and I cannot imagine one which would address these complex issues with greater lucidity, grace, intelligence, and love.”—Claire B. Potter, Wesleyan University
“A very powerful book, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness breaks new ground in using the memoir genre to examine constructs of race and the history of racism in the U. S. from the perspective of a white feminist mother of black sons. Lazarre not only joins the conversation on race being carried on by hooks, West, Gates, et al., but also pushes that conversation in a new and very important direction.”— Maureen Reddy, author of Crossing the Color Line
“An important affirmation of a white woman’s love of her black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over.”—Alice Walker
“In the end there is the great gift of being taken into the life of American black culture. On the way there, this mother and child—the most intimate of relationships from infancy—has no public or political recognition for years. A kind of love story and useful as well to people in interracial lives and families.”—Grace Paley
“Jane Lazarre has written an extraordinary book. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is a personal memoir, a lively tale of teaching and family life, humorous, sad and loving. Yet Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is also a profoundly political book. Through maternal, autobiographical reflection, Jane Lazarre confronts the white racism that has shaped American society and remains our harshest tragedy and deepest challenge.”—Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace
“The operation is over, and on the operating table, an aenesthetized black boy is trying to wake; he flails his arms. What the white doctors and nurses see is a dangerous black male and , afraid, they deep putting him back under, to pacify him. Jane Lazarre is the boy’s white mother, who wishes she and her sons could awake from the nightmare of American racism. Step by Step, she begins by showing the doctors how to treat her beloved boy as a patient, not a threat. In this wonderful book, Lazarre traces unflinchingly all her family’s rich, unfolding lives ‘displaced somewhere between American Blackness and American whiteness.’ Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness will be the classic Lazarre’s The Mother Knot has become, a book in which a piece of American experience gets its full telling, a necessary book.”—Ann Snitow
“This is a passionate, provocative and moving narrative that should be on every American’s reading list. Jane Lazarre writes from an angle of vision that seems completely missing from the fractured and deeply troubled discourse about race in America. Her honesty and courage in telling this story is as instructive as it is praiseworthy, compelling us to think and feel differently.”—Sekou Sundiata, author of The Circle is Unbroken Is a Hard Bop
“Through the profoundly human caring of this book; its luminous beauty, passionate authenticity, truth and power; its multi-lensed and sourced hard-wrung wisdom—and yes, through the art with which it is written—we see, feel, understand what we never have before, the ways of the Whiteness of Whiteness; and we are challenged, enlarged, and enabled, as was Jane Lazarre, to move Beyond. This revelation book, so capable of creating change-making comprehension is of crucial importance for our country’s self-knowledge and vision.”—Tillie Olsen