Relationscapes: “Navigating Mixed-Race Family Dynamics," with Samira Mehta

My mom will often try to draw from her own experience, so I'll bring her a story of racism.

And she'll try to connect with me with a story about what that's like for her as a woman.

And I'll kind of want to be like, mom, I'm also a woman.

Like, do you think that being brown means that I don't experience sexism? All of your experience of sexism as a white woman does not actually help you understand my experience as a woman of color.

And in fact, the thought that they might be the same can hurt me.

Samira Mehta was born to a white American mother and a South Asian immigrant father.

And growing up, she often felt more comfortable with her mother's side of the family.

They didn't slip into languages that she couldn't understand or tease her for finding the food too spicy.

But as she got older, she saw more clearly how her father's culture had shaped her too, and that the people who loved her most hadn't prepared her enough for the racism she would face as a brown woman in America, including the ways racism was showing up inside her own family.

Samira Mehta explores these tensions in her book, The Racism of People Who Love You, Essays on Mixed Race Belonging.

And she joins us to talk about it right now.

Samira Mehta, welcome to Relationscapes.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm really delighted to get to talk to you this morning.

We're talking about your book, The Racism of People Who Love You.

And you say you started thinking about this project in the context of the 2016 election.

Talk about how this book started to cook in your mind.

So academic life is sort of hard on people of color in lots of ways and lots has been written about it.

But I think that as a student, in many ways, I was shielded from that experience.

And so I was in my first year on a tenure track job and there was nobody really actively protecting me from some of the racism in the academy.

There were a couple of people who were really trying to protect me.

But in the academic hierarchy, they couldn't do it in the same way that my advisor could.

Right.

And so that experience was happening sort of in my personal life.

And then out there in the world, it was the run up to the 2016 election.