Brown White Black Quotes

“To retrain ourselves to speak differently is a way of indicating that we care enough to be more precise, to make space for others who are different.”
― Nishta J. Mehra, Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

“Nothing about parenting Shiv is simple, because we're this at once recognizable yet totally unfamiliar amalgam of a twenty-first-century family: white mom, brown mom, black son. We push a lot of cultural buttons[...] We draw attention without trying to, and the world doesn't always know what to do with us. We are still a novelty for most of the people we encounter, and almost everywhere we go, one of us or all of us are in the minority. [...] There is a consciousness about our family's visibility, what it means, how our choices will be judged, and, on top of that, the extra consciousness of trying not to let that factor into our decisions too much.”
― Nishta J. Mehra, Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? This kind of rhetoric has a long history of softening hostile majority groups enough to allow minority groups to make important gains; it becomes a kind of “shame into tolerance” strategy. The problem, of course, with a moral argument predicated on sameness is that it does not necessarily force anyone to work through the fear of difference at the root of their intolerance”
― Nishta J. Mehra, Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

“Being a nontraditional family means constantly navigating and questioning public perceptions and stereotypes while also being occupied with the same mundane tasks and activities as every other family. . . .”
― Nishta J. Mehra, Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion