Outliving the White Lie

<p><strong>Nominee for the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Nonfiction</strong>Part history, part memoir, <em>Outliving the White Lie: A Southerner''s Historical, Genealogical, and Personal Journey</em> 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. <em>Outliving the White Lie</em> 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><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.</p>