In “White Lies”, Natasha Trethewey writes about how she would “pass” for white when she was a child. The title itself has a double meaning. The term “white lie” generally refers to a harmless lie, however in this poem she is literally lying about being white. I had to “complete” what Trethewey has begun here in understanding that her “white lies” were not actually harmless. In the article “How to Read a Poem”, the author explains “this act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem” (Hirsch). When I read Trethewey describing herself as a child lying about living in the better part of town and wearing store-bought dresses as opposed to handmade ones, my first reaction was sympathy. It is understandable for a child to pretend she has nicer things and at this point in the poem, the lies still seem innocent. It is when she writes “like the time a white girl said (squeezing my hand), Now we have three of us in this class” that is becomes apparent these lies are wrong. This line shows that there is a clear racial divide and Trethewey is not just playing pretend, she is denying her identity.
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