The Racism of People Who Love You
Essays on Mixed Race Belonging
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Narrated by:
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Fareeda Pasha
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By:
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Samira Mehta
About this listen
An unflinching look at the challenges and misunderstandings mixed-race people face in family spaces and intimate relationships across their varying cultural backgrounds
In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial.
Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food was too spicy. 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 shows you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. In 7 essays that dissect her own experiences with a frankness tempered by generosity, Mehta confronts questions about:
- authenticity and belonging;
- conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance;
- appropriate mentorship;
- the racism of people who love you.
The Racism of People Who Love You invites people of mixed race into the conversation on race in America and the melding of found and inherited cultures of hybrid identity.
©2023 Samira Mehta (P)2023 Beacon PressListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Thoughtful meditations on identity.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Throughout, Mehta pulls off an impressive set of balancing acts, weaving theory through stories, knitting personal memories, public histories, family dynamics, and cultural norms together with brutal honesty and no small amount of tenderness as she attempts to understand hurtful behavior without excusing it.”—Cannonball Read
“Samira Mehta interweaves laugh-out-loud personal vignettes with piercing reflections on life as a biracial person. Drawing also on her multireligious upbringing, she conveys moments of joy and pain in ways that let us all in on the experience. The Racism of People Who Love You is relatable for all kinds of readers, with especially important insights for all of us who have people of mixed racial and religious backgrounds in our families and social circles.”—Khyati Y. Joshi, author of White Christian Privilege
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Performance
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Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect, Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate, they converse.
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Terrible French pronunciation
- By CA on 01-24-19
By: Julie Barlow, and others
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When We Were Arabs
- A Jewish Family's Forgotten History
- By: Massoud Hayoun
- Narrated by: Massoud Hayoun
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism.
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painful to read.
- By Eli Cukierman on 03-13-20
By: Massoud Hayoun
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The Culture Code
- An Ingenious Way To Understand Why People Around The World Live And Buy As They Do
- By: Clotaire Rapaille
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.
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Mapping cultures
- By Eric on 08-04-08
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Wandering in Strange Lands
- A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
- By: Morgan Jerkins
- Narrated by: Morgan Jerkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times best-selling author of This Will Be My Undoing - a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with” - comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her Northern and Southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.
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Not Just Black History -- It's All Of Our History
- By Ardee on 08-22-20
By: Morgan Jerkins
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Social Justice Parenting
- How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World
- By: Traci Baxley
- Narrated by: Traci Baxley
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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As a global pandemic shuttered schools across the country in 2020, parents found themselves thrust into the role of teacher — in more ways than one. Not only did they take on remote school supervision, but after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, many also grappled with the responsibility to teach their kids about social justice — with few resources to guide them.
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Inspiring, motivating, practical
- By Heather Janetzko on 03-18-24
By: Traci Baxley
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One and Only
- The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One
- By: Lauren Sandler
- Narrated by: Lauren Sandler
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Lauren Sandler is an only child and the mother of one. After investigating what only children are really like and whether stopping at one child is an answer to reconciling motherhood and modernity, she learned a lot about herself - and a lot about our culture's assumptions. In this heartfelt work, Sandler legitimizes a discussion about the larger societal costs of having more than one.
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Data Driven
- By Meghan B on 01-11-22
By: Lauren Sandler
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Your Turn
- How to Be an Adult
- By: Julie Lythcott-Haims
- Narrated by: Julie Lythcott-Haims
- Length: 20 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it mean to be an adult? In the 20th century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.
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Not the book that was advertised
- By M. Rogers on 04-13-21
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Excellent Daughters
- The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
- By: Katherine Zoepf
- Narrated by: Katherine Zoepf
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals.
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Best book on Middle East written this decade
- By Zuzana B on 07-02-17
By: Katherine Zoepf
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Living the Secular Life
- New Answers to Old Questions
- By: Phil Zuckerman
- Narrated by: Andy Paris
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A guidebook for living a life without religion, combining sociological insight and personal inspiration. Over the last 25 years, "no religion" has become the fastest growing religion in the United States. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have turned away from the traditional faiths of the past and embraced a secular - or nonreligious - life, generating societies vastly less religious than at any other time in human history.
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Anecdotal based approach for understanding
- By Gary on 12-30-14
By: Phil Zuckerman
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Laughing Without an Accent
- Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
- By: Firoozeh Dumas
- Narrated by: Firoozeh Dumas
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the human condition. (Hint: It may have to do with brushing and flossing daily.)
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Sigh
- By Sara on 01-29-14
By: Firoozeh Dumas
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The Power of Strangers
- The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World
- By: Joe Keohane
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely.
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Not worth a credit
- By Eringatang on 07-24-21
By: Joe Keohane
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Reclamation
- Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy
- By: Gayle Jessup White
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors - both the enslaver and the enslaved.
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Slow start, eventually a worthwhile story
- By ChocolateDweller on 12-17-21
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Girl Gurl Grrrl
- On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic
- By: Kenya Hunt
- Narrated by: Kenya Hunt, Ebele Okobi, Jessica Horn, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated. But for every milestone, every magazine cover, every new face elected to public office, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience. An American journalist who has been living in London for a decade, Kenya Hunt has made a career of distilling moments, movements, and cultural moods into words. Her work takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible; it is razor sharp cultural observation threaded through evocative and relatable stories.
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Inspired
- By Amazon Customer on 01-29-21
By: Kenya Hunt
What listeners say about The Racism of People Who Love You
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-08-23
Thoughtful, clear, and compelling essays that move deftly between anecdote and analysis
The Racism of People Who Love You is a very good book, and you should read it. In seven thoughtful, compelling, and sometimes (frequently) devastating essays, author Samira Mehta examines the broad concept of what she refers to as “mixedness” through the lens of her particular lived experience as the daughter of a South Asian immigrant father and a white American mother. The essays are about her and her family and about race, culture, and belonging both within and beyond her family. They are also about gender, friendship, work, and class, among other things. Mehta touches on a lot in this fairly brief book, but it all comes up organically because Mehta’s identity and experiences are touched by all of it. Throughout, Mehta pulls off an impressive set of balancing acts, weaving theory through stories, knitting personal memories, public histories, family dynamics, and cultural norms together with brutal honesty and no small amount of tenderness as she attempts to understand hurtful behavior without excusing it.
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- Ruthie Bowles
- 03-17-23
very compelling set of essays
I really enjoyed this book. There were many points where my experience differed from the author's, and that gave me a lot of food for thought as well.
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- Andrea Ajello
- 01-17-23
A must read!
This is a fantastic book: enlightening work on racism as lived and perceived by someone who is mixed race and, as such, has often confronted loved ones who cannot fully grasp, see, and acknowledge all aspects of her true essence.
A great format, with academic research seeping through the author’s life story. What an intimate journey of self-awareness and what a gift to all of us who are trying to do our best to see and celebrate diversity.
The narration does an excellent job at keeping the reader’s attention high and emphasizing key passages.
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- Lee A Bambach
- 01-16-23
Powerful and eye-opening
Samira Mehta masterfully blends personal stories and academic scholarship, offering brilliant insights into the challenges of growing up and living as a mixed race person in the US.
As the White mother of mixed race children, the book was an eye-opener and made me think about how, in spite of my best intentions and efforts, I am unable to understand much of my children’s experience. But it also gave me hope that I can be better at it. I especially appreciated the way in which the author was able to give voice to the unique pain that the children of mixed families feel when they encounter racism from some of the people who love them most in the world, something I have seen in my own family, like when an older White family member challenges my Brown daughter, “why do you say that you are Brown? Is it because you want to get some kind of special benefit?”
Required reading (or listening) for anyone with any kind of a mixed family (the book speaks specifically about race but I think many of its insights would also be very pertinent to other types of mixed families, such as religious or ethnic) and strongly recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about the nuances of racism in the United States, especially as it applies to the rapidly growing number of mixed race people in this country.
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- ndd
- 04-06-23
Thought provoking and intimate
Great narrator, vivid writing, theory and the everyday mixing together. This book is such a wonder!
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- 101
- 09-27-23
Did not love.
I was struck by the fact that the author sounds angry and bitter at…well…everyone. White people don’t understand, Asian people don’t understand, relatives don’t understand, etc. Her experience, fortunately, is not the only one. Many come as immigrants, as my husband did, and treasure their American experience, enjoying the diversity and difference they bring to the world. I’m just sorry that Samira’s experience has been so very hard. But there are a lot of emotions at play here. Expectations have been the death and disappointment of dreams for this author. That is the overriding feel from the book for me.
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