Last Friday, Lacey Schwartz Delgado was invited to campus for Mixed Heritage Week by MOSAIC — Andover’s multi-heritage affinity group. Following her speech at the All School Meeting (ASM), Shwartz Delgado held a screening of her documentary, “Little White Lie,” in Kemper Auditorium (Kemper). This event provided a unique opportunity for the community to gain a deeper understanding of Schwartz Delgado’s personal journey, as well as a chance to engage with the speaker directly in conversation.
Schwartz Delgado spent the first 18 years of her life believing she was a white Jewish woman, unaware of her Black heritage until she reached Georgetown University. While many view Schwartz Delgado’s story as an extraordinary one, she sees it as more nuanced, and in many ways, relatable.
“I feel like a good story is both a ‘crazy story’ but also a ‘relatable story,’ and when I was working through my own situation I realized that that was what it was. Even though I had what I considered to be a more extreme identity issue, I was looking out into the world, and I was seeing all these people who were still reconciling their relationships with their parents, or their racial background. They had still been working through these pieces of themselves. Overall, there were patterns that I was seeing out in the world that were really interesting, and I felt like I could talk about those issues through this film,” shared Schwartz Delgado.
For Schwartz Delgado, the filmmaking process played an integral role in her acceptance of her racial identity and complicated family history. The act of sharing her story was deeply personal, ultimately leading her to choose a documentary format over other mediums.
“A lot of the projects I make are process-oriented… But what makes this unique is that this one was still ongoing. I started this project when I was living in what I considered to be a racial closet and I hadn’t had the conversations with my family… A book is something you write in hindsight, but I wasn’t writing in hindsight, because I was fully in it. I hadn’t had any of those conversations so for me, the idea of documenting the process was something that helped motivate me to share my story, so a documentary was the right medium for this. There were different conversations about telling the story in different ways after that, but for me, I had to first go through the experience of uncovering my family’s secrets.”
Regardless of her family’s decision to be involved, Schwartz Delgado was resolute in her decision to execute the project. She believed her story needed to be told, especially given the unspoken issues within her family. Schwartz Delgado approached her loved ones with a direct and honest request, prepared for any response.
“‘I want to do a film about my life. I want to talk about things we haven’t talked about… we are going to make this film and I would like to ask you to participate,’” Schwartz Delgado said to her family.
She continued, “But I also made it clear to them that if they didn’t want to participate in it, it was OK. I would just shoot it without them. It was also about getting to the point where I was going to make this project no matter who participated,” said Schwartz Delgado.
Many attendees resonated with Schwartz Delgado’s story. MOSAIC board member Francesca Dizon ’26 shared her insights as a multiracial person. She reflected on the challenges of navigating her racial identity in a society that often categorizes people based on predefined labels.
“As a multiracial person, it’s always been, ‘How much agency do you really have in determining your racial identification?’ and it was just so interesting… My biggest takeaway is just to embrace the way that you identify, rather than the groups that society pushes you into,” said Dizon.
Schwartz Delgado’s approach to filmmaking is the idea of direct, honest, and purposeful storytelling, avoiding tangents as much as possible. She advises aspiring students to determine which stories or moments truly serve the core narrative.
“In a lot of ways, the most important thing is knowing what story you’re telling. Whenever I am working on any project, I always find that I start off a lot broader. Sometimes you have stories that you love or moments that you love, but then you have to really get to the point of really asking yourself, ‘Does that moment, does that story really fit in with the story you are telling.’ I really had to synthesize and get to, ‘What is the story I am really telling?’ which is of me and my identity, not about my parent’s marriage. My parent’s marriage affects my identity, which is why I included the parts of it that were relevant to telling the story. It’s less about the breadth of the story, from a time perspective, and more about really being able to know what is the story that you’re telling,” said Schwartz Delgado.
