Outliving the White Lie

Part history part memoir <i>Outliving the White Lie: A Southerner's Historical Genealogical and Personal Journey</i> charts conflicting narratives of American and southern identity through a blend of public family and deeply personal history. Author James Wiggins who was raised in rural Mississippi pairs thorough historical research with his own lived experiences. <i>Outliving the White Lie</i> looks squarely at the many untruths regarding the history and legacy of race that have proliferated among white Americans from the misrepresentations of Black Confederates to the myth of a postracial America. <p/>Though the US was ostensibly established to achieve freedom and shrug off an oppressive English monarchy this mythology of the United States' founding belies a glaring paradox--that this is a country whose foundation depends entirely on coercion and enslavement. How then could generations of decent people people who valued individual liberty and personal autonomy coexist within and alongside such a paradox? Historians suggest an answer: that these apparently dissonant points of view were reconciled in antebellum America by white citizens learning to live with slavery by learning to live a lie. The operative lie throughout American history and the lie underpinning the institution of slavery they argue has always been the fallacy of race--deliberately propagated tenets asserting skin color as the preeminent marker of identity and value. Wiggins takes accepted delusions to task in this moving reconciliation of southern living.