Brown White Black
An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance
Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues. Mehra writes candidly about her efforts to protect and shelter Shiv from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating her child on the realities and dangers of being black in America. In other essays, she discusses growing up in the racially polarized city of Memphis; coming out as queer; being an adoptive mother who is brown; and what it's like to be constantly confronted by people's confusion, concern, and expectations about her child and her family. Above all, Mehra argues passionately for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of identity and family.
Both poignant and challenging, Brown White Black is a remarkable portrait of a loving family on the front lines of some of the most highly charged conversations in our culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mehra, a teacher, reflects on her experience as a lesbian daughter of Indian immigrants with an interracial family in this thoughtful memoir-in-essays. Mehra's parents emigrated from India and raised her in "upper-class Memphis." Weaned on Madonna and Murphy Brown, Mehra wryly describes navigating adolescence as "a brown girl in a white world": "could I dress up as Cher from Clueless, or would everyone automatically assume I should go as Dionne, who was black?" As a 19-year-old college student, she fell in love with Jill, her professor; about a decade later, the couple adopted a black child at birth. Mehra brings that now-5-year-old child, Shiv, to vivid life in affectionately rendered details Shiv's insistence on saying pre-dinner grace (often reminding both forgetful parents), the colorful outfits, the poop jokes, the moments of admitted longing for birth parents. Mehra also documents careful thought processes and interrogates her own assumptions and knee-jerk impulses around parenting, social interactions, and self-presentation. She looks at experience in a measured, nuanced way, empathizing with both marginalized people and the dismayed parents of gay kids who have just come out, and notably with her father, who wanted her to have long hair and marry a man. This insightful, searching book will appeal to anyone contemplating race, family, or growing into oneself.
