Nahanni: Hey, Nahanni Rous here with a quick note before we start the show. If you enjoy Can We Talk?,we think you’ll also like the Judaism Unbound podcast. Judaism Unbound is based on the idea that the most ancient Jewish tradition is…changing Jewish tradition. On the podcast, you’ll hear from people who aren’t always centered in Jewish communities, and learn how they’re re-inventing Judaism to meet the needs of Jews today. Find out more at judaismunbound.com and listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere podcasts are found.

Now, onto the show…

Nahanni: Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history and Jewish culture meet.

In this episode, we’re looking at mixed race identity, and what it’s like to confront racism among friends and family. Our guest has experience with both.

Samira: My name is Samira Mehta. My full name is actually Samira Katherine Hotchkiss Mehta, which, um, my friend Rachel, I think, is the person who recently said the first time she saw my name, she just thought, “That's so interesting.”

Samira’s name reflects her identity—she’s the daughter of a white American mother with deep roots in Puritan New England and a South Asian immigrant father. She’s also a Jew by choice, and a scholar of American religious history and women’s and gender studies. For the past several years, she’s been writing a book about the dynamics of being mixed race in America today.

Samira: The year I started really thinking about it was 2016-2017. A number of things happened that year, most obviously the presidential election of Donald Trump. I had a conversation with my best friend. We were talking about the rising hatred that we were seeing in conjunction with Trump's campaign events. And my best friend is a white man, and he was really asking me how I felt as a woman of color about it. And, I mean, horrified, right? I felt horrified. But I commented to him that that racism scares me, but it doesn't really hurt me. I said, like, the racism that hurts me is the sort of casual racism of people that I care about.

That was the seed for Samira’s new book, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging. In the book, she examines the subtle, everyday racism of intimate interactions. Judith Rosenbaum spoke with Samira about her identity, the differences between racial and cultural privilege, and the conversations about racism and belonging that inspired the book. 

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Samira: He said, “Are you talking about me?”

Judith: Hm.

Samira: And I hadn't been talking about him in particular. I had been sort of thinking about incidents with new colleagues. Like, moments when you're trying to become friends with someone and you think they're gonna be friends and then they say something—and all of a sudden you realize that if they can say that about that person, will they ever really, will you ever be more than their, like, exotic friend?

Judith: Mm.

Samira: And then later that year I was sitting with a friend in a car outside of my apartment. We were having some sort of conversation about Jewish life, and Adina said something about, you know, Ashkenazi Jews, “we.” And then she stopped herself and she was like, I don't wanna erase who you are by saying that you're an Ashkenazi Jew.

And so, first of all, I'm a Jew by choice. And, like, Jews by choice are often treated a little bit as second-class citizens. So the idea that my very, very Ashkenazi friend would, like, include me, felt good in a way that maybe it shouldn't have felt good, but like…it told me that she thought I was a real Jew, and I loved her for it, right?  We were talking about rice and Passover, and we were talking about why we won't eat rice at Passover. That's what we were talking about. Because it's not that we think that Sephardic Jews are wrong, it's just not what we do.

And so we were talking about how it's not what “we” do and she said, I don't wanna erase who you are. And so it was this funny moment, when I was feeling so seen, because she was seeing me as having fallen in love with a particular kind of Judaism that is also hers. And so like I felt like I was feeling so seen, and she had this moment of fear that she was erasing me.

And I thought, this is so interesting. It's so hard to have friendship across difference. But, like, those two experiences happened, and I was sort of mulling over them and I was thinking, I should write about this. It's true, I should write about it. And I started to journal about it.

Fast-forward about a year, I am living in Philadelphia and…my nephew—he's a biracial child with two white parents, with white dads—and I was the first person outside of their immediate family to meet him and one of his dads was saying to me like, “Be there for us, be a resource for us about this.”

And I thought about all of these conversations and I literally went home that day from meeting this tiny little biracial kid who was gonna be raised by white dads and I started writing.

Judith: And the book is dedicated to him, right?

Samira: It is. And he knows it, too. They were showing him the book in the house and he spelled out his name and had a moment about it and then like, went off to do kid things. But then like a week later he saw it in a bookstore. He got really excited and he went and he grabbed his dads by the hand and pulled them over and was like, “Look at it! Look at it! It's my book. It's my book from Aunt Samira!”

Judith: Well, it's interesting to think of this book as, in part, coming out of that sense of needing to be a sort of…guide to a kid and to a family that's trying to figure out how to navigate these issues. Because one of the things that you write about really beautifully is, kind of, coming to realize that neither of your parents really knew how to prepare you to be a person of color in the US. Your mother's white, your father was an immigrant from India, from a high-caste family. So he was part of the racial majority where he came from.

And you write about how they, sort of, assumed, like, well, your mom covered the American piece and your father covered the Indian piece. And so, like, between the two of them, they kind of had the identity thing represented, but that actually neither of them could really speak to the experience of being a racial minority, American-born, in the US. And then you had to come back to your family and sort of say, “Here's where you're not getting it,” or “Here's what I'm experiencing that you didn't.” That you had to help them understand it.

Samira: So my father, uh, died about eleven years ago, twelve years ago. And…in all fairness, like, I've talked to my mom about it, I haven't talked very much about it with aunts and uncles and people like that. My father had mentors from immigrant families, like maybe not immigrants themselves, although sometimes, but often the children of immigrants.

I'm from Connecticut and my dad worked in retail, in clothing. And many of the men that he worked with—and some of the women, but mostly he worked with men—were people who had moved to the suburbs from working in the garment district. And so a lot of his knowledge about how to be an immigrant in the United States came from Italians and Jews. And so he really assumed—like he faced discrimination because he had an accent and because he hadn't gone to the right schools—that for my sister and I, we would be Americans, we would be born here, we would have American accents. And that that would make it—that would be different. Like the discrimination he experienced was because of his foreignness.

And my mom has a lot to say about sexism, and my mom was really careful to bring up feminist daughters. And to his credit, so was my father. I'm not sure he was quite as good at it, but he was really dedicated to the project. And when I think about how careful they were about the feminism, I realized that they just didn't have the tools to see what they needed to do about race.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Samira: I think, as I said, I think my father had this vision of what immigration looked like. I think my mom had a couple of things that she was thinking about, and one is she was very aware of her privilege as a white person. And, like, was aware of and worried about ways in which we wouldn't have that privilege, but also felt like you have an obligation to use your privilege.

And in trying to give us that, sort of, moral, it is your obligation to stand up for people who have less privilege, may have run the analysis of how our privilege was and wasn't like hers a little bit wrong.

And I think she also… she comes from the Midwest, and where my mom is from, whining is, like, the eighth deadly sin. And she didn't know the word microaggression. But one of the things she said was like, “This is really interesting, I didn't have the word microaggression.” And she was talking about how swift and sharp the rebukes in her family can be for whining: you are not to whine.

And the thing is, that coming home and talking about a microaggression sounds like whining, right? Because it's like, um…death by a thousand cuts, right? But every little paper cut is insignificant, right? I don't think she realized that she was teaching us not to come home and talk about microaggressions.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Samira: If you think about how much…cultural value is placed on being stoic, being pleasant in the face of hardship, right? Like, you can understand why it would be very important to my mom to acculturate us to be able to survive in that culture.

Judith: And that's one of the things I appreciate also about your book, is you are really careful to…kind of, explore cultural differences without making the assumption that white culture is just the default culture, right? Like you, sort of, bring that same cultural lens of analysis to all different kinds of culture, not just to the culture that is like, “other,” because it comes from your immigrant parent.

And then there's something else that you talk about in one of your chapters, where you're describing some of the challenges you have when you're trying to explain racist experiences to your mom. And she sort of tries to provide analogies from her own life as a white woman.

And you write how she wants to show you that she understands, and you want her to get that she actually can't ever completely understand. And you have this really, what I thought was sort of brilliant distillation of part of the dynamic that's going on there, which is—and I'm just gonna quote from what you write—you say, “My mother says if she cannot understand something so fundamental to my experience, how can we be close? For me, however, when someone white insists that they understand, it makes me feel like closeness is impossible.”

Samira: You know, I am so impressed by my mom and her reaction to this book. I think she's trying to force-feed it to people in her life, which is not necessarily the reaction that you would expect, right? And I think that it was really hard for her to read. My mother wants so badly to be a good mother who has close, loving, supportive relationships with her daughters. And I think that…she read it, she assimilated and incorporated what I said. She doesn't agree with everything that I said, but she described it as tough to read, but fair.

And I think that that's probably one of the things that she thought was tough to read. Like, her understanding that the very thing that, to her, makes her feel close…actually undermines her goal of closeness.

If you sit with someone while they're having a horrible experience, whatever that horrible experience is—and I don't mean to imply that being half Indian is horrible, but experiencing racism is…

Judith: Sure.

Samira: …and so, if you sit with someone while they are going through something really hard and really unpleasant, you do have insight into what that is like, but you didn't have the experience.

Judith: So much of your book is really about…how important context is, how to hold complexity around these issues that I think often we're not trained to think in complex ways. Like. I think we think about race in black-and-white terms on many levels, not only in terms of color, but in terms of just sort of, like, a binary thinking of good and bad.

And one of the things I really appreciate about your book—and maybe it's because you're writing particularly from the perspective of somebody who's mixed, so you have to be challenging the binary—but one of the ways in which you complicate the conversation is that you talk about how you have the cultural capital of whiteness, basically because the primary person in charge of parenting was your white mother, but not the skin privilege of whiteness. And I thought that was an important complication of how we might think about white privilege. Can you say a little bit about that?

Samira: Well, so remember that to me, and obviously this is, like, not true if you're African American, it's not gonna be true for people who are Asian American, second-generation. But for me, brownness and foreignness—immigrant-ness, are the same thing. I grew up with a real comfort with, you know, this is my first language. I can be sarcastic in several American idioms.

I know that my family landed in the city where I was born, like in 1630-something. So I've got this rootedness in place. You can tell me to go home…but like my family's been here for a very, very long time—I'm a legacy at Harvard. I could have applied with legacy status.

That's cultural capital. It doesn't super-duper matter when I get pulled over by the cops.

Judith: Right. One of the other things that I thought was interesting is, you explore all these different questions about identity and authenticity and racism. And you draw both from your experiences with your white family and friends, and from experiences with your Indian family and other South Asian people.

And you describe cultural tensions and feelings of exclusion in South Asian contexts that are similar in some ways to how you can experience them sometimes in white contexts. But you define those differently in terms of, more like authenticity policing rather than racism. Can you explain a little bit the important distinction between those two?

Samira: So I come from an academic background, right? And so, if you think about racism in the way that either academics think about racism or usually that activists think about racism, it's a power analysis. So, in order to be racist, you have to be in the group that has more power structurally.So racism is about power. Who has the structural power in the society? And that is white people.

But in the context of my Indian family, like certainly my family—a bunch of grownups— had more power than me, a six-year-old or a twelve-year-old, or an eighteen-year-old, or even a twenty-six-year-old, right? And I don't necessarily—again, I have the cultural privileges of whiteness in a lot of ways. I don't have the skin privilege of whiteness.

And so in the context of my dad's family, it's not that it's not necessarily bigotry and it's not necessarily not, sort of, shutting down behavior that is too American or too white. But the power dynamic is really different. And so I don't know that it's racism in the same way. I think it's lots of other things; it's anxiety about what it means to immigrate. I think that there's something really different, when cultures are being, sort of—boundaries are being policed. And I think that in my mom's family, people also don't even totally realize they're doing it, right? They're the dominant culture.

Judith: Do you see parallels between the experiences of mixed identity that you've experienced as a woman of both South Asian and white heritage and the experiences of mixed identity in Christian-Jewish interfaith families?

Samira: I think so. I think that sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Some of what I experience as a person of color, that my white relatives don't understand or know about and can sometimes be gaslighty about, because they don't like whining. Or because they think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

So I think if everyone is white, some of that doesn't happen. I think it's interesting that white Jews probably hear more casual antisemitism out and about than I hear casual racism. If you can't be identified, right, like if you don't have—if you don't look stereotypically Jewish, whatever the person you're talking to thinks that might look like—if you don't have a stereotypically Jewish last name, or if they don't know your last name, you might hear casual antisemitism in ways that I wouldn't hear casual racism. Because they can see on my face that I'm “other.” And so they might think all sorts of things, but they wouldn't say them. And so, like, in that sense, I don't wanna minimize that at all, but I think, like…

Here's an example of something that I don't think happens in interfaith families. My mom and I used to have this massive fight about when to leave for the airport. I want to be there two hours ahead and my mom wants to be there one hour ahead. And my mom would be like, “It's not time to go, why do you wanna go? We've got plenty of time.” And she'd get annoyed with me for trying to rush her out the door. And it's because I get searched at the airport a lot. Less now, but I used to get searched at the airport all of the time. But also if I got in a really long line…I would sometimes watch people waving white women ahead.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Samira: And I think that isn't part of my mom's experience. She just thought I was being anxious. I think she was trying to teach me not to be quite so neurotic. And finally I yelled at her and I was like, do you get, like—are you just some sort of white lady who likes knowing that your kids get hassled by TSA? Do you like this? Is it fun for you to know that I'm gonna end up crying and maybe missing a plane? Because, well, somebody makes me take off all of my clothes? And I could have just been crying and taking off my clothes and not missing my plane, but my mother wouldn't listen to me? I was so angry at her. She had no idea. She was horrified.

Judith: Right. I think one of the things that, you know, because you're writing, you're focusing about the racism of people who love you, you're identifying, as you said at the beginning, you're identifying the pain of encountering racism in the places that are sort of supposed to be safest, where you can be most yourself.

But I think what's really clear from the conversations that you relay in the book—especially conversations with your mom—is that if those relationships are built on enough trust, then there is some room for navigating the complexity of these issues. That doesn't mean it's easy, it doesn't mean there isn't pain involved, but there's a container for it. And I realize that's a big if, that there may be relationships that don't have that level of trust where you can do that.

I'm curious if you have thoughts about, how do we cultivate that? And how do we kind of bring that attention of listening and witnessing? 

Samira: I don't think I'm responsible for my relationship with my mom. People kept expressing massive surprise that I can talk about things like this with my mother. My mom somehow created a relationship that could hold this. I don't know how she did it. Because it's always been there.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Samira: I think that…I think my mom and my grandmother have a really, really different relationship than my relationship with my mother. But my mom called my grandmother to tell her about the book, and the conversation that they had suggests to me that there's something about, like, mothers and daughters in my family.

So my grandmother—my mother calls my grandmother, who's 98, to tell her about the book. And my mom says the title of the book may, you know…it's called The Racism of People Who Love You, and “racism” may seem sort of harsh. And my grandmother says to my mother, “Oh, Linda, racism isn't just what it was when you were young. It's no longer just cross-burning and white supremacy.”

Judith: Good for your grandmother!

Samira: Right? And my mom sets out to explain the concept of microaggressions, and my grandmother says, “Yes. I think that's really right. I think that's a good understanding.” Like basically my grandmother was like, good job, daughter!

Judith: You got it.

Samira: You've learned, you've got it! [Laughs] Right? But, like, my mom took this deep breath to have this conversation with my grandmother, and my grandmother was right there, right?

Judith: Yeah.

Samira: So, there you go. She'll be 99 next month.

Judith: Good for her. May she live and be well.

You write about the importance of mentors, which is a topic that is near and dear to our hearts at JWA. You write specifically about, you know, it’s not enough only to have mentors who look like you, but also mentors that have shared your experience. Can you talk a little bit about how you feel about mentorship?

Samira: I've got a couple of colleagues right now who are half-white and half-something else, all different things. I, at some point, was talking to—and this is in the book—talking to a mixed-race mentor and I was, like, I feel so terrible. I was talking to a Black friend about this thing that happened to me and it just feels so piddly shit compared to being Black in the United States.

And she was so wonderful. She didn't act like it was piddly shit. She said she comes from an entire community that understood that part of their job was to lift her up despite what society was saying to her. “You didn't have that.” There wasn't this, “You are a precious gift as you are” message, because the white people didn't know you needed it. And the Indian people had these anxieties of immigration that they were working out.

And until she said this, I had no—like, of course!

Judith: Right. We need, we need people to help us have those “Aha!” moments. Because sometimes we can't get there in our own heads.

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Nahanni: Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Samira Mehta’s new book is called The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging. It appeared on Oprah's list of "Books We Can't Wait To Read in 2023.”

The Can We Talk? team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum.  Our theme music is by Girls In Trouble. 

You can listen to Can We Talk? online at jwa.org/canwetalk, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please help us spread the word by sharing this and your other favorite episodes with your friends, and share your feedback about Can We Talk? with us at jwa.org/podcastsurvey.

I’m Nahanni Rous. Until next time.

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