I feel like I heard a lot about Little White Lie before I got a chance to see it, but I still enjoyed watching the documentary. Little White Lie is about the documentary’s director, Lacey Schwartz, a Jewish girl who was brought up to believe that she was white, but obviously is black. This belief is less a denial about race than a denial about a fundamental lie at the heart of her parents’ marriage. Cue awkwardness, silence and denial. If no one says that her mom was having an affair with a black man, then it didn’t happen, right? Anyone outside the family responds to the cover story like the kid to the emperor without clothes. As Lacey gets older, the jig is up, and even she can’t buy her parents’ story about resembling a Sicilian grandfather. Little White Lie compares and contrasts expectations with reality and Lacey’s struggle to embrace her identity without fracturing her relationship with her family, especially her father. I think that her mother’s biggest regret is that no one would have known about her affair if her lover was a white guy, and she could have had her cake and eaten it too. Little White Lie also unfolds in NYC so I loved watching it even more. Obviously Little White Lie addresses some salient points about race as a construct versus reality, but I stayed for the fascinating relationship dynamics.