On the Racism of People Who Love You

Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than with her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages that she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food too spicy. But in adulthood, she realized that some of her Indian family’s assumptions about the world had become an indelible part of her—and that her well-intentioned parents had not known how to prepare her for a world that would see her as a person of color. 
 
Popular belief assumes that mixedness gives you the ability to feel at home in more than one culture, but the flipside reveals you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. Samira’s latest book, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging, is an emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, where she reflects on many facets of being multiracial. With frankness and generosity, Samira tackles questions around authenticity and belonging, conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance, appropriate mentorship, and the racism of people who love you. 

Join Samira and Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University A-lan Holt for a conversation that lays bare the pain and the love, the blending of practices, assumptions, and the creation of a culture of hybrid identity.

 
Samira K. Mehta is an associate professor of women and gender studies and of Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in America, was a National Jewish book award finalist. Samira’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Connect with her online at her website and on Twitter @samirakmehta.


A-lan Holt is Director at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. There she trains undergraduates in the areas of diversity and culture, arts leadership, and social justice. She is a mother and practicing artist whose work includes theater, poetry, and film. She is a 2018 Sundance Fellow, a 2018 SF Film Screenwriting Fellow, and a frequent contributor on-air at KQED Arts. In 2016 A-lan's artist book Moonwork was published by Candor Arts Chicago and was shortlisted for the Cornish Family Prize at the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Since its release, Moonwork resides in several private and public institutions around the country. A-lan has over 10 years of experience considering questions of identity, diversity, culture, and aesthetics and holds a degree with honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University.

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