Passing for White

In Natasha Trethewey’s poem “White Lies,” the speaker is indeed the poet herself, revealing her childhood struggles with identity. Although the poem can be understood without knowledge about its author, it is best understood in terms of Trethewey’s identity struggles as a young, biracial girl in Mississippi who can “pass for white” but who cannot separate herself from her mixed racial identity. Although she preferred to and was given the means to escape the darker half of her identity that would cause her shame and exclusion in the racist white society, she could never be successful because each day, she came home to her mixed-race family and was forced to deal with her divided identity. The reader can see that the speaker’s desire to “pass for white” is not actually advantageous because she is attempting to pass up an important part of her identity and her background. Trethewey uses color-related words and double-meanings to highlight her message: there is no triumph in breaking apart one’s own identity.

Trethewey’s use of color-related words in the first stanza of the poem begins the use of double-meanings and sets the stage for the theme of racial identity. The speaker describes the lies she told as a child as “light-bright” and “near-white,” a statement with two intended meanings (line 3). This description refers to both her categorization of the lies as white lies, harmless lies told with only beneficent intentions, and also to the purpose of the lies – to convince white society that she herself is white. She says that she tells these lies “in a black place” (5). This could refer to either her being surrounded by the African-American part of her identity, which she deemed undesirable, or to the unpleasant experience of not being able to settle her own identity. The speaker believes that the lies that she tells are “just white lies,” but the reader knows otherwise; the speaker is denying herself a part of her identity that she needs in order to fully understand herself (6).

Although it is easy for the speaker to fool everyone outside of her home into believing that she is white, her mother will not tolerate the lack of respect for her family inherent in this deception. She is able to gain the trust and acceptance of the veritable white girls at school by pretending to live uptown among white society, but in doing so, she is denying association with her own mother and the part of her family’s past and culture that her mother represents. The mother naturally sees this as a significant infraction, even meriting a mouthful of Ivory soap for the young Trethewey in order to “purify…and cleanse [her] lying tongue out,” but the child does not give up her desire to be part of white society (24-25). As she swallows the Ivory soapsuds, she hopes that they’ll “work from the inside out,” turning her into the little white girl that she so ardently desired to be (27-28).

Although Trethewey says that the lies she told were “just white lies,” it is evident that the reader is expected to see otherwise (6). The futility of trying to change one’s identity is evident at the end of the poem when Trethewey reveals her childhood wish that swallowing the Ivory soapsuds could turn her skin the same color. The ridiculousness of this desire exposes the senselessness of wanting to be something other than oneself. The reader sees that although Trethewey would like to see her childhood deceptions as harmless, silly delusions of a young girl, her actions were, in actuality, significant and detrimental to her self-understanding. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in “Self-reliance,” “He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself.” (626)