Natasha Tretheway’s poem “White Lies” is a story of innocence, childhood, and the struggle for personal identity in America. Tretheway uses the techniques of irony and double meaning in her poem to explore racial identity through the first person narrative of a bi-racial black woman looking back on her childhood. The speaker of the poem employs a double entendre to explore her struggle as a child uncomfortable with her racial identity. In this poem, the speaker, a woman whose skin is “light-bright, near white” looks back on her childhood as a little bi-racial girl who would pretend to be white in order to fit in with the white children of her community. She uses the double entendre “white lies” to portray both the innocence and nature of her “lies.” As she states at the beginning, “[t]he lies I could tell, when I was growing up…were just white lies.” They are “white lies” because she is deceiving white society into believing she is white but also because the deception is done with a certain innocence. White lies are innocent lies, …show more content…
Although the speaker of the poem insists that pretending to be white was “just” a white lie, Tretheway uses irony to show that these lies were indeed detrimental to both the speaker and her society. By telling these “innocent” white lies, the speaker is denying her own racial identity. Instead of accepting her bi-racial heritage she is ignoring her black ancestry and preventing herself from developing a mature personal identity. Her lies are also damaging to her society. By denying her black identity, the speaker propagates the institution of racial segregation and prejudice. If bi-racial children are ashamed of their own racial identities, they prevent their respective groups from one day gaining an equal place in white society. The speaker’s mother in the poem represents this mature racial identity which the speaker still