Brown White Black, Nishta J. Mehra
Brown White Black, Nishta J. Mehra
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Brown White Black
An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

Author: Nishta J. Mehra

Narrator: Nishta J. Mehra

Unabridged: 6 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/05/2019


Synopsis

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance.

Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues. Mehra writes candidly about her efforts to protect and shelter her child from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating Shiv on the realities and dangers of being black in America. In other essays, she discusses her childhood living in the racially polarized city of Memphis; coming out as queer; being an adoptive mother who is brown; and what it's like to be constantly confronted by people's confusion, concern, and expectations about her child and her family. Above all, Mehra argues passionately for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of identity and family.

Both poignant and challenging, Brown White Black is a remarkable portrait of a loving family on the front lines of some of the most highly charged conversations in our culture.

"Brown White Black is a beautiful memoir about the blending of a family, filled with different cultures and backgrounds, defying social norms and expectations about what a “normal” family should be." -- BookRiot

About Nishta J. Mehra

NISHTA J. MEHRA was raised among a tight-knit network of Indian immigrants in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the proud graduate of St. Mary's Episcopal School and holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Rice University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. An English teacher with over a decade of experience in middle and high school classrooms, she lives with her wife, Jill, and their child, Shiv, in Phoenix. She is the author of The Pomegranate King, a collection of essays.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Allison on August 17, 2020

Nishta J. Mehra’s BROWN WHITE BLACK means so much to me. This essay collection is an intimate, honest portrayal of Mehta’s life experiences as a first generation Indian-American queer woman, married to a white woman, raising a Black gender nonconforming child. It is both so specific to her experienc......more

Goodreads review by Amanda on July 29, 2019

This took me a while to get through, not because it’s not well-written (it is), or compelling (it is) or important (definitely is), but because the essays, almost all of them, challenged me in some way, challenged my beliefs or assumptions or subconscious. So I read one every few days, let that one......more

Goodreads review by Christina on July 06, 2019

I adored this collection of thoughtful, thought-provoking, and profound essays on life, family, race, sexuality, gender, parenting, and so much more. Nishta Mehra has a unique voice, unflinchingly honest yet kind, and she is using it to offer others a perspective on life we might not see or appreciat......more

Goodreads review by Laura on May 22, 2020

I loved this. Just a really solid collection of essays all around. Mehra is so good at coming at things from different angles, at looking at all her different identities and experiences and how they intersect in her life. She writes about the racism she's experienced as a brown woman, and she also w......more

Goodreads review by Jane on April 18, 2019

I NEED you to read this book and consume the idea that privilege exits in most facets of life: your straightness, your whiteness, your biological family-ness, your same skin toned couple. Taking a look at my life through that of one that is (on the surface) very different than my own is an exercise......more