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 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.

Free, suggested donation of $10.