An essay collection by the Blue Jean Gourmet blogger describes how her experiences as an Indian-American, the wife of a white Christian woman and the mother of an adopted black son have been challenged by rigid cultural family norms. - (Baker & Taylor)
Essays describe how the author's experiences as an Indian American, the wife of a white Christian woman, and the mother of an adopted black son have been challenged by rigid cultural family norms. - (Baker & Taylor)
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 Shiv from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating her child on the realities and dangers of being black in America. In other essays, she discusses growing up 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.
- (
McMillan Palgrave)
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.
- (
McMillan Palgrave)
Library Journal Reviews
Middle-school English teacher Mehra, who writes the popular food blog Blue Jean Gourmet, is the daughter of Indian immigrants, wife of a white Christian woman, and mother of an adopted black son named Shiv. Hence, she can tell us about crossing the jagged boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and religion in this country and how she still keeps herself and her family whole.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.
Library Journal Reviews
Mehra (The Pomegranate King) blends memoir and cultural analysis to dive into the complex realities of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and the constructs that surround these topics. Told through the lens of Mehra's experience as the first-generation daughter of Indian immigrants, raised in a predominantly white neighborhood in Tennessee, this work wrestles with the author's own privilege as she examines the narratives of her youth, her sexuality, her relationship with her parents, her wife, Jill, and her black son, Shiv, whose expression of gender inspires a new awareness of Mehra's own unconscious biases. It is through her relationships that Mehra learns and grows, the process sometimes painful as she bumps against rigid expectations, including those of her father. Her experience of adoption is especially inspiring, as is her account of Shiv's exploration of gender. VERDICT Mehra's nuanced and thought-provoking work resonates on multiple levels—from the immigrant experience and race relations to accepting one's sexuality, adoption, parenthood, and more. Excellent for readers interested in family and issues of identity in America.—Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Mehra, a teacher, reflects on her experience as a lesbian daughter of Indian immigrants with an interracial family in this thoughtful memoir-in-essays. Mehra's parents emigrated from India and raised her in "upper-class Memphis." Weaned on Madonna and Murphy Brown, Mehra wryly describes navigating adolescence as "a brown girl in a white world": "could I dress up as Cher from Clueless, or would everyone automatically assume I should go as Dionne, who was black?" As a 19-year-old college student, she fell in love with Jill, her professor; about a decade later, the couple adopted a black child at birth. Mehra brings that now-5-year-old child, Shiv, to vivid life in affectionately rendered details—Shiv's insistence on saying pre-dinner grace (often reminding both forgetful parents), the colorful outfits, the poop jokes, the moments of admitted longing for birth parents. Mehra also documents careful thought processes and interrogates her own assumptions and knee-jerk impulses around parenting, social interactions, and self-presentation. She looks at experience in a measured, nuanced way, empathizing with both marginalized people and the dismayed parents of gay kids who have just come out, and notably with her father, who wanted her to have long hair and marry a man. This insightful, searching book will appeal to anyone contemplating race, family, or growing into oneself. (Feb.)
Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.