Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
When Racism is All in the Family (with Samira Mehta)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the terrain of human identity and connection. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about mixed race families is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies, Samira Mehta.
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. Do you think being brown means 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 they might be the same can hurt me.
BLAIR HODGES: 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 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.
Are You Saying I’m Racist? – 01:59
BLAIR HODGES: Samira Mehta, welcome to Relationscapes.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really delighted to get to talk to you this morning.
BLAIR HODGES: 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.
SAMIRA MEHTA: 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 my advisor could. Right? And so that experience was happening in my personal life. And then out there in the world, it was the run-up to the 2016 election, and there was just a kind of vitriolic racism in the public sphere that I had never seen before.
And so I was out to dinner with one of my best friends, and we were talking about that horrible, vitriolic racism. And he was asking me—he's white—what I felt and thought about it. And I somehow made the comment, because I was contrasting these two experiences, right? Like, experiencing racism in my work environment in ways I hadn't before, and also realizing that sometimes I didn't know how to deal with the racism in my work environment because in my family life, I had learned to make excuses for particular behaviors.
So when there's a behavior that you think is problematic, that comes from white people, but it comes from your mother, who you know would like—I mean, my mother quite literally took out a second mortgage on her home to send me to college. When you know that this is someone who would literally mortgage their future for you, how do you call them out on that?
But then when you've learned to accept that totally unconscious behavior from one person, how do you say, well, okay, but you're my colleague. You're not somebody I know and love and trust and can go by on your intention. I have to call you out. How do you do that?
So I had been thinking a lot about that, and my friend was asking me, like, how do you feel about people saying the kinds of things they're saying at Trump rallies? And I said, I mean, that's hateful. It's horrible. It's frightening. It terrifies me. But it doesn't hurt me in the way that the racism of people who love me hurts me.
And I was thinking both about the actual pain of a comment from within your family or from one of your closest friends, and also the fact that it hurts you to learn to accept those things.
BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. Talk a little bit more about that hurt. Like, is it because you feel like you don't have the same kind of recourse, or where does that come from?
SAMIRA MEHTA: Well, I think that, first of all, it's really hard to see when it comes from loved ones. Something people say a lot of the time when they do things that are wrong—when you say something racist or you say something homophobic or you say something sexist—and that doesn't line up with your politics.
You don't think you're saying something racist. You believe that Black Lives Matter. You have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard. A friend of mine just posted on the Internet a picture—he's from a really expensive college town, or he's not from there, but he works at the college and lives in this very expensive college town.
And he posted a photo from one of his neighbor's yards. And it was like a Black Lives Matter sign, one of those signs that is like, you know, science is real and love is love and nobody is illegal—
BLAIR HODGES: And water is good.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And water is good. And the people also had a sign against low-income housing. Okay, right? So these people, they have all of the right values, but they don't want their property value hurt or the tenor of their community changed. And they don't understand these are interlocking things. Right? Right?
But they would never—if you said that's racist, they would never be able to hear that. Right? They have a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard. And so when you grow up around and loving people like that, they want their intent to count rather than their impact. And you learn to let them.
And the reality is that their intent does matter to you. Right? Like, I'm never going to—people do do this, but I'm not personally going to try to get into a conversation with folks marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. Right? I'm not going to—I mean, yelling, like, “Jews will not replace us.”
I would totally get into conversations with the people trying to protect their community from that, but I would never get into conversations with people marching with torches through the streets yelling racist things.
BLAIR HODGES: You don't expect a dialogue there.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But I am going to say to my beloved best friend, hey, when you said that, I think you're not understanding where I'm coming from. I don't think you mean to be supporting a racist system. And indeed, when my friend and I were talking and I said this thing, like, the racism that really hurts me is the racism of people who love me, he paused and he said, are you talking about me?
And the thing is that, in that moment, I hadn't been trying to get him to ask that question. Right? I hadn't. I had been thinking about trying to make friends at work and watching people have racial blind spots, and watching those racial blind spots hurt me, or wanting them to debate—somebody did something super racist, and somebody who I love very much was like, well, I can't imagine that he'd be racist. I'd hate to think that of him.
And I kind of wanted to say, well, but here I am, a person of color, telling you that he did this thing to me. Give me an explanation that isn't racism. Like, being a total asshole—you could tell me that he does this to the white people too, in which case he's a total asshole. But it's actually easier to believe that, on some level, he's unconsciously racist. Also, prove to me that he's doing it to the white people. Right? Like, I wanted to. You want to.
So I was thinking about all of that. But when my best friend asked me if I was talking about him, I had to say kind of, because of course there had been moments in our friendship—including the moment that I write about in the book when I actually called him on it. And we had this argument, and he said, are you saying that I'm racist?
And I don't remember if I said yes, but I didn't say no, in my memory right now. And now I'm like, how did I write about it? Memory is weird, right? But in my memory, there was this long pause in which I didn't say I wasn't saying that. And he said to me, well, that's just really great.
And we had this awkward meal together and then went to bed.
The Intentions of White Friends – 09:39
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I remember the way you talk about it is that you talk about the mental calculation that you had to do when he asked you, are you talking about me? And then you had to be like, okay, now I need to make this decision about how open and honest I am in this moment about this thing.
From what I recall, you were explaining a TSA encounter, right? Like, you had been pulled aside yet again by the TSA at the airport and searched yet again. And you were pointing out that this disproportionately happens to people of color. You've experienced that. And the friend was like, I don't know. They're just trying to keep us all safe. I think it's a good trade-off for us all to feel safe, don't you think? And you're like, whoa, hold on a second.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right? And also in that argument, I was wanting him to take into account how it felt—how violating this can feel.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And he made the comment, like, basically, don't argue with emotion, argue with logic. So it also felt sexist.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's also like emotion and logic can't be separated either. It's a fiction that—you know. And also sexist, as you say. Like, women are emotional and men are logical, and this kind of attitude.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And also your desire to feel safe is a feeling, right? The privileging of some people feeling safe over other people not being racially profiled is a feeling.
So we had this horrible fight. But what I was thinking is, look, if I say, right, then yes, I'm saying that you're racist. That's like the worst thing that you can say to a good liberal white person.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh yeah, I like this phrase you use, the one-drop racism rule. Like, we think of the one-drop thing—it used to be, like, if you have one drop of Black heritage or blood, you're, you know, whatever. You're taking it to be like a one-drop racism rule: if you've done anything racist, then you're a total racist, right?
SAMIRA MEHTA: And so then all of a sudden, you might as well get out a white hood. And that's a horrible thing to believe about oneself, and it's a horrible way to feel that somebody would think that of you. And it doesn't really allow room for growth. Right?
And I've done other conversations, and sometimes with hosts who are people of color, and they've sort of said, like, are you giving space for the white fragility of white people when you sort of take into account what their intent might be?
And to me, I'm doing two things when I take intent into account. One is I'm saying, I know that you may be thinking this thing or that thing or this other thing, all of which give you sort of the benefit of the doubt. Right? So I write in another place in the book about my aunt saying—me coming downstairs from the guest room in Indian clothes, like really casual, not fancy Indian clothes.
And it was blisteringly hot. It was July. There was no air conditioning in the house. So this is, like, really cool clothing. And my aunt saying to me, what, are you super ethnic now?
And I run through all of the things that my aunt might be thinking, including, as a white woman who lives in liberal communities, there's a lot of appropriation of Asian culture. And my aunt would know that's problematic, in part because she knows my dad's family, some of whom think it's problematic.
So in that moment, maybe she was forgetting that even though I'm culturally so much more a piece with American culture than I am with the Indian immigrant side of my family, my relationship to Indianness is really different than hers. It isn't cultural appropriation to do this. And also, what would be wrong with being super ethnic and embracing and trying to connect more with that side of my heritage? Right? Like, why would that be bad?
But I sort of explore why she might have said that, why she might have been taken aback, how you don't expect to have to code-switch in your own family and in your own home. And of course, if you're mixed race, you never have that luxury. But my Indian family doesn't think they're going to have to code-switch in their own homes either.
And somebody was like, aren't you just giving room to her white fragility when you run through all of those things? And part of what I'm doing is I'm saying, I know these things, and I'm still bothered. So you can't explain, oh, you didn't mean any harm, you were just thinking X, Y, and Z. I know that you're thinking X, Y, and Z—or at least I know that you're thinking X and Y. I might not know all of what you're thinking, but I know some of what you're thinking, and it still hurts.
I know and believe in your good intentions. You don't need to explain them to me. And you've still done something problematic. So partly I'm trying to disarm people saying, oh, if you knew where I was coming from, you wouldn't be bothered. I'm saying, yes, I do. I've known you all my life. I've got a guess. I might be wrong, but I've got a generous guess, and it still bothers me.
But the other thing that I'm doing is I'm saying I know that you're not like those people in Charlottesville. I know that you're not the police beating Rodney King. I know all of that. And yet—and so I'm willing to give you space to learn and grow. You're still hurting me, and yet you still hurt me. But here it is.
And the friend I was talking about with the TSA incident—he's still my best friend. And people keep asking me when I give talks, like, how do you decide when something is a deal breaker?
And part of it is, if we have a close, loving relationship, you'd have to do something really terrible for me to cancel you based on one thing. That one thing is one data point. And you might have to earn some trust back after that one data point. But I want to stick around and see if you can.
If when you do that one thing, I realize that actually I wasn't really surprised—it made sense, it was the most egregious thing, but there were lots of other things that, if I had been looking, I wouldn't be surprised—that's different. But if, like my friend, you've shocked me with your opinion, then I'm going to stick around and see whether that was a weird aberration.
And can we talk through it? And can you learn and grow? You know, he read—he's the person who, when I said we had this whole conversation and I said, you know, I toy with writing about this, and he said, stop toying and do it. Like, you need to write about this. It was his idea, or his permission. Right?
Like, I had been toying with it, but I was again afraid that I would lose the relationship. And he was like, oh no, you should do it. And he's read over this multiple times. He knew what was in it when it was published.
He told me recently that what he forgot to ask me to put in is that he doesn't think any of those things anymore. And I'm glad he didn't ask me to, because I would have declined. I would have said, this is a story about the moment. And yes, there's been a lot of growth.
Honestly, I'm not sure he believed it at the time. I think at the time he might have been having fun playing devil's advocate and not realizing the harm that he was doing, which is also different from having an opinion that you're willing to double down on.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Not better, just to be clear.
Precarious Forgiveness – 17:25
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it seems like you're sort of trying to do that math, and you say you've got pushback from some people of color who—it seems like maybe your proximity to whiteness and white culture leads you to be more inclined to do that kind of connecting mental work.
I also think maybe you might be at different points in your life, in different mental spaces, where sometimes you have more bandwidth to withstand some of the microaggressions and some of the racism, whereas maybe other times in your life it just wouldn't work. And you'd say, actually, for my own protection and safety, I just need to break this off, at least for a while.
So it seems context dependent, too, like how you'd react.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I think it's very context dependent. Right? It's that thing about whether or not what you're getting is confirmation or surprise.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: It's whether, in that moment, you have the bandwidth to put up with it. It's whether you think that the relationship is strong enough to take the hit and to rebuild trust. It's whether you think the person, even if they're not in that moment, is self-reflective enough to go back and think about it. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I would never tell somebody else what to do. I mean, you said something about maybe it's my proximity to white culture. And what I would say is, proximity to white culture is really dangerous because it can lead you to forgive. Right? Like I said, if you've learned how to forgive a behavior on the part of your mom or your grandmother or your uncle or your father or—right?—your cousin or your best friend, you're letting more of that go out there in the world. Right? It's like you're—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you become the excuse for it, too. Like, oh, but I know Samira—how could I be racist? Right?
SAMIRA MEHTA: And she doesn't mind when I say this. And the answer is, I actually do mind. But I've done some sort of cost-benefit analysis, and I'm not telling you about it, and I'm privately thinking less well of you, but have decided not to go there.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But also it can lead you to hurt yourself. Right? What happens when you've learned how to accept a behavior from your mother, but then you get it from your boss?
And so the example that I'm thinking of is 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. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Like how she experiences misogyny and sexism.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I'll kind of want to be like, Mom, I'm also a woman. Like, maybe if you were talking to a man who was not white, that would work. Like, oh, that's how racism works in your life. This is like—don't explain sexism to me. Do you think that being brown means that I don't experience sexism?
Like, stop. Like, be quiet and listen to me tell you about my experience, and understand that there's a gap. You're not 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.
Because this is the same woman who taught me that if I got lost in a crowd in the 1980s—remember stranger danger? I do—that I should go find a police officer. Right? This is the same woman who taught me—and of course, if you're a white woman, you should go—I mean, turns out that domestic violence and rape are huge in the police force. But leaving that aside, right?—of course, if you're a white woman, the police are there to protect you.
If you're a brown woman, that's not true. Right? And so failure to understand those differences are huge. But—and my mother now knows that. Right? Like, my mom has learned that. But learning to sort of accept and put up with that dynamic from my mother, and even appreciate it as her attempts to connect, has made it really hard for me to know what to do when white women who are my supervisor or my mentor—or a supervisor who wants to be a mentor.
So you take a problem in the classroom to your mentor—and my most recent mentor is a woman of color, so I'm not talking about her—but you take a problem to a mentor, and the mentor tells you how they would deal with it. And as she's talking, you realize that because she's white and you're not, her advice is actually probably not going to work for you.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But now you've gotten advice from somebody in a hierarchical relationship to you, and you're in trouble if you don't follow it, or at least you're potentially in trouble if you don't follow it. But you can tell that it won't work.
BLAIR HODGES: And your muscle memory is already to excuse it because you've done that with your mom for years.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Exactly. And it was hard to learn not to trust your mom. Right? Like, you got hurt every time you learned that your mom's experience didn't match, but you still have that muscle memory of trust.
Racial and Cultural Comfort – 22:46
BLAIR HODGES: It seems like multiracial folks experience love and hurt and racism in these really complicated ways. And you're not alone in this. I mean, your book gives us really great context here. You say there's been a huge growth of multiracial people in the United States. In 2010, it was about 3% of the population. That's jumped up to 10% by 2020.
And for you, 2.7 million are half white, half Asian. You have South Asian heritage and white Midwestern American heritage. So you're kind of situating yourself in this broader picture and using your personal stories to talk about what it's like to experience racism from the people that love you, especially from family members.
And so it really stood out to me where you talked about feeling culturally uncomfortable, where you could often feel more racially comfortable, but racially uncomfortable, where you could feel more culturally comfortable.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right? So my friend Tom came up with that phrase to describe the book. He sent it to me in an email after reading a chapter. So that came from a white British, Cambridge-educated man, which I loved. I felt very seen. Right? Like, that's a gift of someone really paying attention to you.
And it's true. Right? Or at least it's sort of true. My South Asian family isn't necessarily—or at least the kind of generation that I'm the oldest of the grandchildren born in the United States, and the youngest grandchild is maybe 18 years younger than I am. So I would be really open to the discovery that her experience is very different from mine because in the, like, 20 years of intervening time, people learned things. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Sure, yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But for me, my family is high caste. And so in their experience in India, they are used to being sort of on the top. Right? They're Hindu, they're high caste. So it's not like my dad and his siblings and his community have a lot of experience with being racialized minorities.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, he didn't have an underdog feeling then. He sort of had a privileged sort—
SAMIRA MEHTA: Of feeling, one assumes. And he assumed, I think—and this is, I think, a very common assumption among immigrants, particularly immigrants who possibly took a social step down in moving to the United States, but maybe even others—that the point of coming is, in some ways, to give yourself a better life, but mostly to give your kids a better life.
You will be an immigrant, but your kids will be American. And my father really needed that to be true. So he needed to—he gave up a lot of social privilege and capital and, like, you know, his network of college friends and colleagues and all of that to come to the United States, where he needed to believe that what he was experiencing was anti-immigrant bias and not racism.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Because if it was racism, it would pass on to us. And if it was anti-immigrant bias, it would end with him. And he kind of needed to believe that it was partly that he had an accent and didn't always understand what was going on, and also that he hadn't gone to fancy American schools.
And, like, look, I've been watching what has happened with my book, and nothing has come of this yet, but I think something like 30 friends have nominated my book for campus read books on their colleges. And why is that the case? I went to Swarthmore, I went to Harvard, I went to Emory. I have this crazy network of people who became professors. And that's how my book is getting nominated for those things in various college campuses.
And again, it's like usually a longish process. Right? So I don't know if anything will ever come of that, but I can see my network working. Right? And my father didn't have that. So in some ways he's right.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But in other ways, I'm currently making plans to drive from Denver to New England. And I am thinking about where it is going to feel dangerous as a person of color.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. To stop at a hotel or to eat at a restaurant or whatever.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right? And I have a friend—the first time I did the drive, I was worried about it, and a white friend came with me so that I would be driving with a white woman. I then did it twice—once on either end of—I went home at the start of the pandemic and came back when school went back in person.
I did those trips solo, and it was a little nerve-wracking. And I'm now doing it with a friend who is flying out and doing it with me. So I'll be once again doing the trip with a white woman.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And these are the kind of calculations your father might not have anticipated, I think.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Well, my father also spent every single moment, really, of his life in the United States with a white woman. Right? Like, he and my mom were married within three years of my father getting here. And my father occasionally traveled without my mother—like every now and then he'd go on a business trip or something like that.
But, like, you know, I grew up doing the classic American vacation where you get in a car and you drive—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the road trip.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah, yeah. But always with both of my parents.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And you talk about the kind of—I sense a sort of loneliness from you, in a sense, as you talked about some of the ways that your white mother might overlook the way that you experience racism, but also the ways that your own Indian father would overlook it. In part because he really wanted to believe, as you said, that racism wasn't a factor.
Rather, it would be this immigrant bias that would go away for you. He wanted to believe that you wouldn't have to experience that. And that seemed to evoke a kind of loneliness for you because you couldn't really go to either parent to get that really necessary validation and coaching and sort of support through the racism you were experiencing.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Also, like, having to defend it as racism. Right? My mom didn't have a context. Neither of them had a context for microaggressions. I just said my mom didn't. But the reason I'm going to her and not my dad is that my mom was really the person doing the child rearing. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And you say you're more of a Connecticut Yankee yourself.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah. It's not that my mom was worse at it than my father. It's that my mother was far more present than my father. And so, like—I mean, my father just worked really long hours. And I think also I am an age where the model minority myth was very important for Asian communities.
And the model minority myth is a terrible, terrible thing. It's not good for Asian people. Right? Like, because it says if you just work hard enough, you'll be accepted as white. And then anytime that you're not accepted as white, it becomes very easy to say, ah, see, you didn't work hard enough.
And so also I grew up at a moment when there wasn't a lot of awareness. I think now the model minority stereotype is understood to be, at best, a double-edged sword for many Asians. But that was also less true when I was growing up. That perhaps also contributed to some of the loneliness. Right?
Failing the Authenticity Test – 30:16
BLAIR HODGES: All of this kind of reminds me of the “Failing the Authenticity Test” chapter. This is a chapter where you're talking about how, depending on the context you're in, you're kind of being judged according to how authentic you are to your Indian side of your heritage or being perceived as white.
And you talk about how in your family dynamics, sometimes there might be, like, sexism—like your father might do stuff that was really sexist or whatever—and you're trying to figure out, like, is this kind of rooted in Indian culture? Is this just family dynamics?
But then there's the problem of if you try to critique it, you might come across as a white colonizer sort of police of a culture. Right? So it gets really tricky even within your own family when you're trying to think about how authentic you are, what authentic Indian culture even is, how you can critique that culture, if you can. It's a very complicated dynamic.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah. And to be fair to my father, I could always push back against sexism where my father was concerned without getting too much into that dynamic. The place where it could be a problem was that my father—my parents went far more, not completely, and I'm sure that people with no Indianness in their family would see a lot of Indianness in how my nuclear family operated—but my father basically figured he had moved to the United States and he was raising American women.
And so he allowed for a certain amount of pushback. Where it became a problem was when I was 24. My father and I traveled to India together. And part of what was wrong was that my father wanted to sort of have it both ways. Like, he wanted to make all of the decisions, but it was sort of unclear: were we two adults traveling together, paying our own way, or were we a parent and a child traveling together?
And what would happen is my father would want to make the decisions but would want me to pay my own way. And so, for instance, he would want to travel, and he would maybe be right that this was the safest thing to do. Right? Like, I don't know. But he would be like, we should go on this trip to see this friend. And I would be like, I can't afford that plane ticket.
Or I knew that we were going to some weddings. I knew that I would maybe buy something dressy to wear to the weddings, but my father didn't want me wearing the same outfit to both weddings because it was going to be all the same people. And he wanted me wearing Indian clothes to the run-up to the weddings. Like, all of the—you know, North Indian weddings go on for days.
And I had, like, I don't know, I had a really pretty skirt and blouse. And I got the skirt in Paris and was very proud. It was my Paris couture—it wasn't actual couture, I had just bought it in Paris, just to be clear—and, like, an embroidered top from Ann Taylor that matched the skirt. And I was very proud of having put this together.
And my father wanted me to have many Indian outfits for these events. And I was a student, and I was like, I can't. Even if I can pay for those outfits, I don't have a use for them in my normal life. Like, anyone who doesn't understand that I am going to buy one very, very fancy sari and wear it to all of the fancy sari events—and, like, dry clean it in between—I don't care what they think.
But my father did care. Right? So sometimes there was that tension, which I think has more to do with who my father was than it had to do with his Indianness. But then the way that it would get navigated—I felt totally free to talk back to him. I felt totally free to be like, dude, you can call the shots and pay my way, or I can pay my way, in which case you need to let me call the shots about my money. Right?
Or not—in other ways, sort of not be obedient. And for my father, in the American context, that was fine. But in an Indian context, he felt, I think, like he was losing face. I wasn't giving him the appropriate amount of deference.
Now, it's also worth noting that when this happened, my father had not lived in India in about 30 years.
BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.
SAMIRA MEHTA: So it's all—and hadn't been back to visit twice in that 30-year period of time. So it's also totally possible—and this is part of what's complicated around the question of authenticity, right?—which is sort of a chimera anyway. But the India that my father knew was an India before the United States had experienced second-wave feminism. Right?
Like, my father left India in about 1970. The bulk of, like, women in the United States had been able to have credit cards for, like, a year or so when he moved to the United States. And so the kind of deference that he expected daughters to give to their fathers might have been completely and totally in line with Indian culture.
It also might have been a full generation out of date. Right? And so that is the kind of thing that would happen with my dad.
What would happen—the sort of colonizer thing—is more you're navigating. Like, I'd be encountering and interacting with my father's friends, right? And they would treat me in an excruciatingly patronizing way, basically. Like, I don't want to say that there is no sexual harassment—obviously there is—but these are my father's friends. They're not being that kind of inappropriate with me at all. I just want to be super clear. They're being patronizing. Oh, you're such a nice girl. You just don't understand.
Okay, if I don't understand, explain it to me. But let's not assume. Right? Like, I was at no point in my education—and I had not yet gone to grad school, although this remains true—at no point in my education have I ever really studied the relationship between India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and the United States during the Cold War. Right?
And the upshot is that, despite the fact that India is the largest democracy, they had closer ties to the USSR, and the United States had closer ties to Pakistan. So I said something that didn't reflect knowing that history. And I was told, oh, you're such a sweet girl. Of course you think that. You just don't—
And I'm like, okay, give me the geopolitical lesson. Right? But let's assume here that I'm capable of understanding if given the information. Let's also understand that I might think that you're a biased source, depending on what you have to say. Maybe not. Right? It would probably depend on, as you said, like, all of this is contextual.
How is it being explained? Like, I'm not going to be like, oh yes, anti-Americanism is the way to go, but I'm also not a particularly nationalistic person. I'm fine with—right? But I'm going to reject the idea that what my administration does makes me personally bad. Possibly me personally responsible, but not me personally evil. Right?
And so, like, how is this going to go? And in that situation, if I push back, right, there is this—are you being the ugly American? If you critique gender expectations in the extended family, will you be told, this is our culture and you should respect it?
Which is maybe true if I'm not actually also a member of the family. Right? Do I have the right to participate in creating a family that has space for my cultural assumptions? And, you know, families are not monoliths. So there are absolutely relatives who would think that I automatically have that. Right? Right?
Like, I have some relatives who live in India who are impressed that I can be as polite as I can be in India, but have no expectation that I would, from their standpoint. Like, of course she's an American and she's culturally different.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So they're like, she's doing pretty good.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. There are going to be relatives who think that you don't have that right at all. Right? Like, you're the younger generation. We set the tones for the family. And then there are going to be people who say, of course you should do that, but then it's going to feel really uncomfortable, and they're going to push back, and they're not even going to necessarily understand why.
And in the moment, neither am I. It's not like I, as I'm navigating these experiences, have—sometimes I have this running commentary. I have this colleague who likes to write about religious experience, and I was critiquing his work for not taking systemic structures of oppression into account. And he's like, well, but people don't experience those. When you experience whatever, do you think, ah, this is sexism?
And I was like, duh, of course I do. Right? Like, people know about the structures of oppression that shape their lives. I kind of said to him, the only reason you don't think you do is because you're a white man.
BLAIR HODGES: What did he say?
SAMIRA MEHTA: I think I said that in my head and I didn't say it out loud.
BLAIR HODGES: It's one of those moments.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah, I think I said it in my head or I thought of it at 3 o'clock in the morning. Right? Like—
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But you think about it, you realize it later. You don't realize it in the moment. And that also means that you can't deal with it in the moment.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: You're just reacting.
Where Are You From? – 39:54
BLAIR HODGES: It's interesting because sometimes you can, because some things are very repetitive. I'm thinking of your chapter, “Where Are You From?” This is a question that you'll get, and it could happen so often that you really could develop a repertoire of responses to this.
Especially when white people would approach you and just say, well, where are you from? And you might say, oh, I'm from Connecticut. And they would say, well, no, like, where—where are you from? Right? And they're actually talking about race.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. So, like, I will always tell people I'm from New Haven, Connecticut, which is sort of true, but it's not really true. Right? I'm from a town right outside of New Haven, Connecticut, that is so small that it doesn't have its own grocery store. I say in the book—and this is true—it has two farm stands.
When I was growing up there, neither of them were open between Thanksgiving and Easter. One of them had a fire, and when they renovated after the fire, they also winterized, so they're now open all year. So, like, you could probably buy—I think you can buy milk there—and pretty overpriced, like, expensive produce. But it's the kind of place where you can get gourmet cheese and focaccia. But I'm not sure that you could buy, like, dish detergent or toilet paper.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Okay, so the grocery store is in New Haven, and so I'll tell people that I'm from New Haven, Connecticut. And then when they say, no, where are you really from, that's when I'll back up and say that I'm from my small town.
BLAIR HODGES: So then that's your second answer, is the smaller town, which again the questioner is going to be more confused at this point.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I'm like, oh, well, I guess I'm not really from New Haven. I always say that because people have never heard of where I'm from. This is where I'm from. Or—and then if they say, no, no, no, where are you really from, I'll be like, okay, obviously my small town doesn't have a hospital, so my birth certificate says I'm from New Haven.
And if they push beyond that, because at this point I'm clearly digging in my heels, I'll say, do you ask every single white person you meet where their ancestry is from?
BLAIR HODGES: Oh.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Oh, I think that's an honor in the world of white people basically reserved for redheads who are presumed to be Irish.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Or Scottish, with my red beard. It does happen occasionally.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Fair. I mean, I'm not saying they are consistently Irish. I'm saying they're presumed. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Where's this question coming from for you? Like, you've encountered it throughout your life.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Where is it coming from, do you think?
SAMIRA MEHTA: So I think that Americans assume that if you are not white or potentially Black, you are a perpetual foreigner. Right? So if you're white, that seems like a plausible American identity, although obviously your ancestry is from somewhere else. I mean, you know—or if you're—
BLAIR HODGES: Black in a predominantly white area. I think that happens here. I'm in Salt Lake—I'm in Utah—so that can happen here. Like, well, where are you from? Because it's so predominantly white here.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. I think if you're Black and you're in Salt Lake and you say, I'm from here, I bet that goes weird. I suspect that if you say, oh, I'm from North Carolina—That ends the conversation and makes sense to people.
BLAIR HODGES: That's what people wanted to find out.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. They want to find out—they assume you're from—and again, I'm not saying that's fine. Right? That person might very well be from Portland, Oregon, or from Moab. Right? Sure.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
SAMIRA MEHTA: That's a total possibility. And the assumption is that the infinite regression of “where are you from?”—like, that's a fair thing to do to somebody who isn't white.
I think it does happen less to Black people because I think people are aware enough of sort of what Black people are doing in the United States. And of course, sometimes the answer is, I am descended from enslaved people. And sometimes the answer is, oh, my parents moved here from Nigeria, like, three years before I was born. Right?
Or I moved here from Nigeria when I was four, which is why I don't have an accent—you know, why I have an American accent. Or, oh, you're identifying something in my voice. And I actually did a talk about this “Where Are You From?” question at a synagogue, and one of the women there was South African—and white South African—and she said, people ask me where I'm from all the time, and I never mind.
And I said, that makes sense to me, though, because from your accent, you moved here as an adult or at least later in your childhood.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Like, I have a really good friend who moved to the United States from England when she was five, and she has an American accent until she gets on the phone with relatives. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: So what I said to this woman is, like, you sound like you're from South Africa. That's something that comes from your lived experience rather than from your genetics. Right? And so asking you where you're from is a question about your life.
BLAIR HODGES: Also, she might feel from somewhere, whereas you're from—you really are from here.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: So, like, if she's asked where she's from, she really has her own compelling answer that makes sense to her, rather than—as for you, it's like, well, I know what you're thinking about me, but I'm actually from Connecticut.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I should say that I don't mind being asked where I'm from. What I mind is when people don't accept my answer. So, like, I live in Denver, Colorado, which feels like an awfully foreign country to me a lot of the time. Right? Like, the weather is—it’s like—never mind that it's culturally pretty different from the Northeast.
But, like, I get dehydrated. When I first moved here, I was constantly dehydrated because I didn't know that I needed to take water with me. Right? Like, the inside of my nose dries out. It snows one day and it's 60 degrees the next day. Like, it's just a very different place.
So when people ask me where I'm from, I'm perfectly happy to tell them that I'm from the Northeast.
BLAIR HODGES: But then it's when they're like, but no, where are you from—from? Or where are you really from?
SAMIRA MEHTA: The question never bothers me. So I got my PhD at Emory, and they have these really famous people who are professors. And what they have to do is they have to show up in six different classes over the course of the year. So Jimmy Carter was one of them.
And Jimmy Carter came to a class that I was the teaching assistant for, and he had us all go around the room and say where we were from. And Jimmy Carter, of course, ran for president and is a politician. I think he was better at being a humanitarian than he was a politician in a second term. But he's a politician, and so for every single person, he had something to say about where they were from.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, because he had some sort of connection there.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. And so I said I was from New Haven. And he said, ah, they put clams on pizza there.
BLAIR HODGES: Do they really?
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yes, they do. And I said, yes, they do. And he said, and tell me they like it. And I was like, many of them love it. I'm a vegetarian, but many of them love it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I love that. Right? Like, I don't mind that.
BLAIR HODGES: First of all, he was asking everybody,
SAMIRA MEHTA: but second, I don't care. Like, even if I suspect that you're not asking all of the white people in the room, I don't mind if you ask me, as long as you accept that I'm from the New Haven suburbs.
BLAIR HODGES: Right!
SAMIRA MEHTA: That's fine.
BLAIR HODGES: It's a really good chapter. Again, I should remind people, the book is called The Racism of People Who Love You. And that chapter stood out to me a lot. It's near the beginning of the book. I think it's a good way to start it off. But I want people to check that essay out.
The Vegetarian Thanksgiving Dish – 47:48
BLAIR HODGES: You just mentioned being a vegetarian. Let's talk about the “Meat Is Murder” chapter. This is also kind of about identity and the complications of what authenticity is and what identity really is.
Because some people might assume that you're a vegetarian because of your Asian background, because of being from India. Right? And then other people—but for you, you kind of think it's more rooted in revulsion. Like, you actually just don't like meat. This is more of just like, ugh—you don't like it. Right?
SAMIRA MEHTA: Well, so I think it's complicated. Right? Like, if you were to ask me why I'm a vegetarian and I were to answer the question, I might bring up the revulsion. But probably I would talk about animal rights and environmentalism. I would sound like somebody who went to Swarthmore College in the late ’90s.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And a friend of mine actually tells a really funny story. My friend lives in New York, and he told me this story—we were going out to lunch—and he had looked for a place with good vegetarian food near where I was going to be, because I had this tiny little window.
And he realized that the only places he knew were not vegetarian-friendly, and so it had been harder than anticipated. And he told me this story about, like, ten people we went to college with all got together—somebody had come into town—and so there was a gathering of all of the people from college they knew.
And they were like, okay, where are we going to go for dinner? Does anyone have any dietary restrictions? And nobody did. And they were like, how is it possible that we have ten Swarthmore alums here and nobody is a vegetarian or a vegan?
And then they were like, okay, who used to be vegetarian or vegan? And the entire room raised their hand.
And in my case, like, I every now and then will be in a situation in which I'll eat some shellfish or something really low on the food chain if I'm like—yeah. Like, I was recently stuck in an airport, and they had some sort of clam chowder made without bacon, but they were out of their one vegetarian thing. They had Impossible burgers, and they were out. And so I had a bowl of the clam chowder.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this is my partner, too. She'll eat some fish sometimes or something like that.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah. And I won't really eat, like, non-shellfish. Like, if I think it had cognition, I'm out.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, okay. So—and so it is more, like, animal-rights-oriented, in addition to whatever revulsion. Because you talk about, too, just being grossed out by it as a little kid.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah. It's also true that, like—I don't know, because I kind of tapped out of paying attention when I stopped eating it—but we eat pretty high up on the food chain in terms of the ocean. Right? Like, tuna is—overfishing is a big deal, is kind of what I'm saying. Right? Or at least it was when I was like, that's it, I'm out. And then I stopped paying attention.
Yeah, but I sound like that. But if you think about the way that I conduct myself, I don't want things touching. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. This is the story—on Thanksgiving, you had prepared a special dish, because there's so much meat at Thanksgiving. You prepared your own special dish and had this aunt who, like, dipped the serving spoon or whatever into the meat dish and then used that same one and dipped it into this other dish that you had spent so much time preparing, and it ruined Thanksgiving. Like, your dish was done.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I mean, in all fairness, it wasn't, like, the most elaborate dish, but yeah. Like, it was one of those things where, to me, that dish—
BLAIR HODGES: You're so—in all fairness, Samira—you’re so—in all fairness, they ruined your Thanksgiving special dish.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Sure. And to me, it's no longer vegetarian. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
SAMIRA MEHTA: There were, like, other contexts to it. I had had a boyfriend who had been at the last—I had been with this guy for quite a while, and he was really good at making sure there was vegetarian food for me.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And then the year after we broke up, I put a lot of work into helping my mother cook the meal. But he was the person who—he would always do one thing, and it would be the special thing for me. And I had sort of stopped—I hadn't stopped appreciating that he was doing that, but I hadn't realized that in the time he had been doing that, it was sort of like all of the responsibility had landed on him.
And so, like, there wasn't going to be—so I had had a couple of years when it was kind of not working for me. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh, this is why he did this thing. And I was like, okay, I can do that for myself. I can take care of myself. But it was to my aunt, I think—like, why wouldn't that be vegetarian? Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Because you—you wouldn't eat it after that. And again, she seemed upset by that, too.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Super upset. She was really ticked. She thought I was being, like, difficult.
BLAIR HODGES: That's what was weird to me, is that she wasn't apologetic to you. She was almost like, how dare you not eat your dish that I stuck this spoon in? Which seems so harsh.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I mean, I think that one of the things that is true is that my mom's family has a super strong family culture, and people aren't super adapting to things that are outside of their culture. And so to my aunt, like, I wasn't—and my mom's family really values a kind of rationalism. So if I'm saying I'm vegetarian for animal rights reasons and environmental reasons, and moving the spoon does not support any of those industries—
BLAIR HODGES: Right, exactly.
SAMIRA MEHTA: What's the big deal? And my mother, when I talked to her about it later—and I didn't even know this—explained to me that when I was very small, I had been taught to never do that, because in Hinduism, that would render the entire dish non-vegetarian.
And we would go to these potlucks where there would be lots of vegetarian food and then, like, a chicken dish, and you had to keep all of the spoons separate.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. You can't cross-contaminate.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. But it's such a big piece of Indian culture, because there are always vegetarians around who are going to care about that. And it's not like I don't—it’s not—I, like everybody else, have read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I know that restaurant kitchens—who knows what's going on back there?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's plenty of cross-contamination back there.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But in my mom's house—like, in my own, like, when I've seen it—that's no skin off of anyone's nose except mine in that moment to make a peanut butter sandwich instead. Right? Right? And that's what I'd rather do.
If you had me over for a cookout and touched my veggie burger with the spatula that you had been flipping meat with, I would probably eat the hamburger anyway. But I have these friends here in Colorado Springs where I went for a cookout at their house, and the very first day, they got out tin foil and a different set of tongs for my vegetarian food. And I totally noticed and appreciated that. Right?
But in my own home or in my mother's home, I don't feel that I have to do that. Like, I don't feel that I should have to eat something that I'm uncomfortable with. I'll do it to be polite outside of my house, but if you're a member of my family and you've disrupted things, I don't feel like I'm being really rude to you to say—
BLAIR HODGES: Actually, no, that doesn't work. Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right?
BLAIR HODGES: But you also talk about how, like, your mom's side of the family and your dad's side of the family would read your vegetarianism differently, too. Right? And because for your dad's side—for people who are into practicing Hinduism or who maybe aren't—it's more like—yeah.
So people that aren't vegetarian on that side look at your vegetarianism and are kind of unsettled by it for different reasons. Right? Like, what are you trying to be, holier-than-thou kind of a thing?
SAMIRA MEHTA: I don't even know if it's that. I think they're sort of annoyed by it. They think it's silly. They think it's pointless and impossible in the United States. And I find this really annoying because I feel like there's a constant critique of not being Indian enough. And here is this thing about which I'm very, very Indian.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And then that's critiqued as being annoying.
Picking Apart Race and Culture – 55:56
BLAIR HODGES: Again, the power of your book speaks to these dynamics that had never really crossed my mind. I obviously don't have a mixed-race background in that sense and have not experienced these kinds of tensions that exist between these two sides of your family, and how something as simple as vegetarianism can be received so differently by different sides of the family.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Well, and I think sometimes it's about race and sometimes it's about culture.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And how do you pick that apart too? Right? Like, how can you—
SAMIRA MEHTA: Well, you know, so I think part of what's really complicated is because of the racial dynamics of the United States. When it's about culture and it's the white side of the family who's sort of not being accommodating of the other culture, there is sort of this inherent element of racism because race is sort of about the power dynamics of the United States. Right?
Or it's the white family not knowing, seeing, or understanding how life plays out differently for people of color.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: On the Indian side of the family, I tend not to call it racism because the power dynamic is different. I tend to think about it in terms of authenticity policing or cultural difference. But it can be every bit as uncomfortable. It's just sort of embedded in the microcosm of the environment.
Right? Like, in a family setting in which I, yes, have proximity to whiteness—which again is super problematic, right? Like, it can give you privileges that it's not fair that you have. It can give you fragility that you really shouldn't have. It's a complicated thing.
But you would think that that would give me more power in the context of the family, and it doesn't necessarily. Right? Sure. And this is something I've talked to a number of mixed-race people with white mothers, and I think this is very complicated because the racial dynamics can make it really hard to address the gender dynamics in a family.
Right? If you're the white woman, how do you tell your non-white husband that they're being sexist? Right? People aren't good at talking about intersectional identity. And intersectional identity, right, means that you're the combination of all of your identities.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, they're not good at talking about, like, just sexism itself, let alone intersectional issues.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. So, like, a white woman can absolutely be the subject of sexism from a non-white man. Also, her white womanhood can, as anyone who's ever heard anything about Emmett Till knows, create massive danger for non-white men. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yep.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And that's a very complicated dynamic to unpack, in which some people have gender power, other people don't have gender power, some people have race power, other people don't have race power. And that's a very, very complicated thing to parse.
BLAIR HODGES: And what would you say to people who say—they're bigoted people—who claim that that's why interracial marriage is a problem in general? They say, oh, I'm not racist, I just think there are these cultural dynamics that make interracial relationships problematic. How do you respond to that kind of argument?
SAMIRA MEHTA: I think there are cultural differences that can add complication to marriage. I think that's completely and totally true. I just don't think they're necessarily tied to race. Right?
Like, if you are marrying across class lines, there may be cultural differences that can be complicated and that you'll need to navigate. If somebody is from France and the other person—
A friend of mine tells a story about doing a visa interview with the State Department, and it was a married couple, and they'd been married forever, and they're coming in to prove that they're married so that they can move to the United States.
And, you know, if somebody's been married, like, three months when they show up, you really interrogate them because you want to know, is it a marriage for a visa? These people have been married for, like, 20 years. They have children who are, you know, starting college.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Like, basically what has happened is both kids have gone to college in the United States, and so the parents are like, okay, we're relocating, or something like that. I don't know. But anyway, one of them was from a country with a very particular coffee-drinking culture. Like, you drink coffee at these times of day. The other person was from Seattle.
So my friend said, like, what's a big cultural tension in your marriage? And they both burst out laughing and said, coffee. Because the person in Seattle thinks that you put a pot of coffee on in the morning and then you drink it until it's gone, and then you make another one.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And you drink coffee all day. And the person from the country with a really prescribed coffee-drinking culture is like, you drink coffee with milk in the morning, and you can have, like, one more cup of coffee at this time in the afternoon, and then you're done. Maybe you can have a cup of coffee with dessert.
And that's a European country. Right? Like, that's white people. Everyone in this marriage is white. And so racial difference doesn't determine cultural difference. And cultural difference, yeah, can be challenging and needs to be navigated.
But that can happen in—there are people who think that what you do on Thanksgiving is spend time with your family, talking and having conversations and visiting with people who have come a long way. And there are people who think what you do on Thanksgiving is watch a football game.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. Or stick the spoon in both dishes. There's people who do that, too.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. But, like, I have often thought, oh my God, what would I do if I fell in love with somebody who wanted to watch the game on Thanksgiving? Could a marriage survive that? And that could be the person next door who is like you in every way.
Acknowledge the Gap – 01:02:03
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly. All right, I wanted to also mention, before we move to the end here, some things that stood out to me as I'm reading through this. And one of them was—you mentioned this before—when you would talk about instances of racism or discrimination that you encountered, and your mom would try to relate to you by talking about sexism or misogyny.
And you pointed out already kind of what was difficult about that. But what really stood out to me is where you said you needed her to acknowledge the gap between you, the difference between you, the chasm in some ways between you, in order for you to be intimately close together. In order to be close, acknowledge the gap rather than deny or ignore it.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I think that for my mother, this idea that there are things about my experience that she can never understand makes it harder for her to understand how we could be close. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I get that. Like, I totally—as a parent thinking about my own kids—I can sympathize.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. Right? Like, I sometimes feel like I just really want to be heard and understood. And I sometimes wonder whether that comes from feeling like neither of my parents totally understood me—maybe for this interracial reason, and maybe like nobody ever understands anybody else perfectly. Right? Like, fundamentally part of the human condition—
BLAIR HODGES: There's always a gap. Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But for me, if we can acknowledge the gap—if we can acknowledge that you don't automatically—like, when my mom brings forth an experience of sexism, a lot of the time I'm sort of like, I don't feel like it demonstrates understanding of the experience. It doesn't demonstrate understanding about how there's this additional factor in my navigation that she doesn't have.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It changes the topic in a way.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. It feels like she's saying, well, what about me? And that's not what she means to do. She means to be bridging a connection by empathetically sharing from her own experience.
Whereas I've got some—and my mom has really worked hard to learn to do this, by the way. I feel like it's really important to say that she has really worked on this. But I have a lot of white women friends who are my peers who I think were raised more with the idea that there's this gulf created by race.
And they tend to listen and ask questions, or to say, gee, I have this kind of experience—or we'll talk about our experiences as women and we'll come up with common ground—but they will often sort of caveat and say, like, I know that I'm a white woman. Is this how you experience it as well, or is it different because you're not one?
And that allows me to feel much closer because I feel like they're not needing to ignore the differences in our experience.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Intimacy comes out of acknowledging a distance.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. I mean, and I kind of—I've never thought of this, and so I've never said this to my mother—but if one is heterosexual, there is in one's romantic relationships and one's marriages and things like that this gender gap, in which one person is, you know, really being shafted by patriarchy in lots and lots of ways, and the other person is also being shafted by patriarchy—
BLAIR HODGES: In different ways, but in less obvious ways.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. And in ways that are—you know, I'm not saying that, like—yeah, I'm on board.
BLAIR HODGES: No, yeah, I'm on board. There's a whole episode about how sexism also hurts men, although it's worse for women.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Sexism also hurts men, but sexism does not result in men being killed by their partners at a crazy rate, or still earning dramatically less for exactly equal work. Right? Like, absolutely, patriarchy and sexism hurt men, but not in comparable ways. Right? Exactly.
And so do we think—is that an irreparable bar to closeness in friendships across genders, in romantic relationships, in mother-son relationships or father-daughter relationships? People don't necessarily say that. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: There are lots of people who are closer to their opposite-gender parent. I have friends who are, like, mind-blowingly close to their same-gender siblings, but I also have friends who are closer to their opposite-gender siblings because there was less competition. Right? Like, it plays out in lots of different ways. And I think that that's where acknowledging the difference matters.
Assimilation and Heritage – 01:06:59
BLAIR HODGES: It feeds intimacy. All right, two more questions. The first one is just that I'm interested in an example—something that you'd like to say that you wish more people understood about what it's like to grow up in a mixed-race family. Something that you really wish more people understood about that experience.
SAMIRA MEHTA: I think that I wish that people understood two things. The first is that it can be very hard, especially for a little kid who is learning how to behave, when a behavior that is praised in one part of the family is criticized in another part of the family. And children learn to code-switch really early and really well.
BLAIR HODGES: What's an example of that?
SAMIRA MEHTA: This is funny. I'm actually coming up with an example not from my life, or from this book, but from my first book.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Okay.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I'm sorry—it's because you told me that you're in Salt Lake, and now I have Mormonism on the brain—
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. [laughs]
SAMIRA MEHTA: So in my first book, I talk about this couple, and they're a Mormon-Jewish couple. And they are teaching their kids about both religions. And so somebody died, and one of the little kids—and they were with the Jewish side of the family—and one of the little kids said, well, we will be with them again.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And then she paused and said, "in our memories." And it was like she realized that she had code-switched—she was in the wrong side of the family for that one.
BLAIR HODGES: That's pretty deep.
SAMIRA MEHTA: So, like, the example that I would give is: in my mom's family, if somebody says to you, would you like a cup of tea, you're supposed to say yes or no. If you say no, it probably will not be offered again.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And you are most certainly not supposed to say—if you're a kid in the family—oh, would you like a cup of tea? Let me get up and get it for you, and then go start rooting around in somebody else's kitchen.
On my dad's side of the family, if you're offered a cup of tea, you're supposed to say no, and it will be offered again. And, like, the second or third time, it's okay to say yes, but it's rude to say yes the first time.
But also what you should say, if you're a younger person in the family, is you should deduce that on some level the older person wants the cup of tea, and you should say, would you like a cup of tea? Can I fix it for you? And then you should go and root around in their kitchen and make the tea.
Now, you shouldn't do this if you're, like, a friend—
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But if you're a younger visiting niece or—
BLAIR HODGES: Sure, sure.
SAMIRA MEHTA: In my mom's family, like, there are people who I've lived with, and I'm super comfortable in their house, and I would help myself to something.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But there are also people where I feel like I'm a guest, and I wouldn't presume. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: So it would be presuming to go mess around with somebody else's kitchen. Whereas on the other side of the family, you both—on my mom's side, if you say no to that first cup of tea, you're not going to get a cup of tea unless you say, an appropriate amount of time later, you know, actually, if you're still offering, I've reconsidered—but it probably won't get offered again.
And on my dad's side, it'll get offered several times. It's rude to say yes the first time. You need to wait until the second or third time, and maybe you should then get up and offer to make it.
And so, like, you can see how that would be confusing when you're little. Right? Like, I didn't know until I had spent years offending people that I was supposed to be offering to make the tea. I had been politely assuming I was a guest and it wasn't my kitchen. Right? Like, I had learned the part where I needed to say no the first time.
But I never did pick up on the fact that I was supposed to be offering to make it. Right? Because the cousin who would jump up and offer to make it lived with my aunt during the summers. He was also a cousin. His parents live in India. He was with his dad's side of the family during the school year and his mom's side during the summers.
So I was thinking of me as a guest and him as a resident.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And so I didn't pick up that I was supposed to be doing that.
A more basic example is: in the United States, generally speaking, you show respect by making eye contact. And in India, if you're a child or a woman, you show respect by—look, or somehow subordinate—you look down.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I know that intellectually, but it's almost impossible for me to do. And ironically, it's my Indian father who was the person who, when yelling at you, would say, look me in the eye when I'm talking to you. Because he knew that looking away is a sign of disrespect in America, and he wanted to be shown respect. And he understood that we were American.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But as a result, even though I know that, I just feel like I'm being horrible and rude if I'm not making eye contact.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, good examples. Oh, and then you're connecting back—and you said, I think, you said there were two things that you—
SAMIRA MEHTA: Yes. So the other thing that I wish people knew, or had a way of thinking about, is what is assimilation and what is having a mixed heritage.
So one problem that—and I don't know if this is how it is now. I don't really—I have individual relationships with Indian people, but I don't go to Indian community events. Right? Like, I'm not in that network.
When I was, for instance, having my last try at joining Indian communal things in college, my sort of evidence of white culture was seen as problematic assimilation. So, like, the fact that I would rather have matzo ball soup than kitchari—which is true, I would way rather—was seen as trying to be white rather than my mother. I mean, my mother actually, I think, makes kitchari very well. But rather than, I am legitimately also part of this culture. Right? It's seen as this problematic assimilation or, like, power grab toward whiteness.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I'm not saying it's never that. I think there's always that—
BLAIR HODGES: That's the thing, is it could be—
SAMIRA MEHTA: That problematic power grab.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: But also, like, the comfort food of your childhood is often the comfort food of your mother's childhood.
BLAIR HODGES: That's right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And so, like, I don't eat Jell-O anymore because Jell-O is usually not vegetarian. But when I was homesick, I was fed Jell-O and chicken noodle soup, not kitchari. My mother makes kitchari, but it isn't the thing that she thought of to serve sick children. She thought of dry toast and applesauce and matzo ball soup and raspberry Jell-O or red Jell-O. I don't know if Jell-O really maps onto fruit.
BLAIR HODGES: It's got fruit flavors. We're talking with Samira Mehta. She's an associate professor of women and gender studies and Jewish studies, and her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender. And we're talking about the book The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging. And Samira also mentioned her earlier book, Beyond the Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in America. You all can check out both of those books.
Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:14:26
BLAIR HODGES: All right, well, we've got to the final segment here, and this is where we talk about regrets, challenges, or surprises. You can speak to any of these things—if there's something you would change about the book now, what was challenging about the book, or what surprised you in the course of writing it?
SAMIRA MEHTA: So one thing that—I don't even know how I made this mistake—the assimilation chapter was supposed to have this cute punny title. And somehow I had two documents on my computer, and one that I was working on that chapter in—one had the cute punny title, and it was “Sari, Not Sorry,” like S-A-R-I, not S-O-R-R-Y. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, “Sari, Not Sorry” documents.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And one was, like, a rough draft, and the other was supposed to be notes. And somehow the final one that got submitted said “Assimilation” instead of the punny title. And it never—
BLAIR HODGES: Was it the one that said “appropriation”? Was that the one?
SAMIRA MEHTA: No—assimilation.
BLAIR HODGES: Which chapter is that, then?
SAMIRA MEHTA: Isn't there a chapter called “Assimilation”? Oh, no, you're right. It's the assimilation/appropriation chapter.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: So it was—the appropriation chapter was supposed to be called “Sari, Not Sorry.” And I—
BLAIR HODGES: So it's just called the theme thing. Yeah, that is too bad.
SAMIRA MEHTA: The other thing—and I think this was inevitable—I told people that I was writing this book, if I valued the relationship with them enough, that I would have been willing to take the example out of the book if they asked me to.
But if I didn't think that—if I thought you wouldn't let me say what I had to say, if I thought I would have to deal with a lot of white fragility in talking about it, or if we're not, for whatever reason, close enough now for it to be a massively present concern, I didn't reach out.
And so I know, for instance, that at least one of my aunts who I didn't ask—like, the aunt characters are composites, but the events are real events that happened with real people. And I made them composites really deliberately, partly because I have 17 aunts and uncles before you start counting my parents, cousins, or close family friends.
And so I was like, nobody needs to keep track of that many people. But partly because I didn't want to have anyone be identifiable and be hurt and be talked about. So they're deliberate composites.
But I didn't check about some of the individual incidents, and I wouldn't go back and do it differently. But I know that I've really hurt some feelings.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And I wish that there were a way to tell a truth without hurting feelings. But I think that part of the concept of white fragility is that when you talk about the racism of progressive white people, you hurt their feelings. And I would prefer to shine a light on the racism so that more of it goes away and more people learn.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I guess maybe, like, fiction could do that. But you're writing essays.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. And I don't know how to create a character in a world and a plot. That's not what I do.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. Yeah. One thing I'll say, though, for the aunt composite—one downside is, like, if you don't name them, then it could be all of them. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's kind of the truth trade-off, is by not identifying it, then any—but it really only counts within a small group of people, like the people that really know you, the people that really know your aunts.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Right. And my aunts can tell who's who anyway because they were there for all of it. Right? And—but my goal was to really not say, and this happened in this city, right, so that the aunt who lives in city A—her family—I couldn't tell.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: The aunt who lives in city B, her friends could believe it's the aunt who lives in city C. Right? Right. That was what I wanted.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. It's tricky writing about that personal stuff. You know, essays and memoir get into these areas of, like, how honest can we be? How do we maintain loving relationships through writing about those things?
SAMIRA MEHTA: And what I would say is, I feel like the hurt caused was unavoidable if I was going to be able to tell my truth and my story. But I really regret that.
I also will say that there are people I didn't write about because what I did try to do in the composite is always sort of say, what do I imagine that this person thinks about this? There are people in my life who I think are jerks. Right? Where I can't—I tried, when I was running through what people might be thinking, to really give people the benefit of the doubt.
And there are people for whom I can't do that, and I didn't write about them.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SAMIRA MEHTA: And so another piece that is hard is, if you showed up in this book and you are somebody who is close to me, it means that I care enough about you to want to entertain the question of your interiority despite these things.
And so, like, the people who I hurt are actually the people who I love and trust more than the people who I chose not to write about, who I'm like, I think the answer to why you did this is you're kind of a jerk. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: And because, again, the book is about the racism of people who love you, like, there's a loving relationship there.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Some people wanted me to call it “The Racism of People You Love,” and I decided not to because I felt like actually the issue is that despite the fact that they love you, they can still be racist toward you, rather than you love somebody and then you get shocked and surprised and slapped upside the head by their racism.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Different story.
BLAIR HODGES: All right, Samira, thanks for spending time with us here on Relationscapes. This has been great.
SAMIRA MEHTA: Thank you so much.
Outro – 01:20:05
BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. If this is your first time joining me, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out some other episodes. If you're enjoying the podcast, take a second to rate and review it in Apple Podcasts.
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Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist joining you from Salt Lake City. And I hope to see you back on the trail here with me on Relationscapes.