CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

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—her white family 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. In this episode Samira is joined by the Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University A-lan Holt for a conversation that tackles questions around authenticity and belonging, conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance, appropriate mentorship, and the racism of people who love you. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on April 20th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available here (ciispod.com). To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms 

[Theme music concludes] 

A-lan Holt: Hello, everybody. Hello, Samira. So, we're going to start with just a really quick verbal introduction of what we look like visually. I am a light skinned African American woman. I have long dark locks, and I'm wearing a black and white shawl and standing in front of a virtual background of a mural by Jess X. Snow.  

Samira Mehta: And I am mixed race as I guess is obvious from the title of the book, but I'm a sort of light skinned, cisgendered woman with shoulder length curly hair. I happen to be wearing big clunky headphones because I can't get ear buds to work. And I am sitting in front of a bookshelf that has among other things, pictures of pets and family and copies of the book.  

A-lan: Yes, and I'm so excited to be in conversation about the most beautiful and open and just generous book, The Racism of People Who Love You. How are you feeling? Just the book has come out very recently! How does it feel for it to be in the world?  

Samira: You know, it's really funny. I wanted to hear what- I really liked the audio book narrator who is not me and my friends who did the audio book. Apparently, my writing and my speaking are so alike that friends who read the book said it's like hanging out with you and friends who listened said it was like hanging out with you, but it was really weird that it wasn't your voice. So, the narrator was phenomenal. She worked really closely with me, but I wanted to hear this, not me. And on the three-month anniversary of the book coming out, my turn came up in the Denver Public Library, audio book queue, and that was really fun.  

A-lan: Oh, that's beautiful. I actually had a chance to read, to both read the book and listen to the audio. So, I'm glad you said that because it really like leans us into all of the beautiful stories that you tell about your family and your friends and the beautiful network of community. Albeit complicated, but really beautiful network of community that you've found.  

Samira: Thank you. 

A-lan: Yeah. So, I'd love to start with that kind of origin story that you lead the book with. So, the first chapter is called “Where Are You Really From?” Which we'll get into a lot. But you start by interrogating yourself, deeply looking at your origin story through the backgrounds, cultures, and particularly your parents and their marital union. I'm curious if you could talk about how your parents met when they met and kind of how they were able to navigate their cultural differences in order to bring about a family of which you're a part of.  

Samira: So, I'll do my best. So, my parents met at a wedding in Pittsburgh. My mom was 20 and my dad was 31. And I've always sort of said like, when I was 20, if I had met a guy 1.5 times my age, right? No. Like, yeah, 1.5 times my age at an event at the beginning of my senior year, he would have locked me in my room. He would have like driven from my hometown of New Haven to outside of Philly where I went to college, brought me home and locked me up.  

A-lan: Right?  

Samira: But so, they met at a wedding in Pittsburgh. My mom went to Oberlin and in the Oberlin co-ops, at least in the 1960s, you couldn't have a single no matter how far along you were. So, her sophomore year, her roommate was a senior. So that woman got to travel abroad for a year and while traveling abroad, met a college friend of my dad's. And they got married at the beginning of my mom's senior year. And she met my dad there.  

They had an epistolary romance, which my sister and I thought was bananas because my father had horrific handwriting, like handwriting where nobody ever thought you would forge it because no one would forge something that illegible, but also where you had to tell them what you were being given permission to do because nobody could read it. So, like how, how this happened is unclear. My mom once played her guitar in the Cleveland airport until she had enough money to fly standby to like see my father. And she can- she called him from the airport and he being 31 was like horrified that she had done this thing.  

At some point they got serious enough that he went to Illinois where my mom is from to meet my grandparents who liked him because he was the first boyfriend to ever show up wearing a suit and tie. So that seemed good. My mom says that she thinks that my grandparents were maybe a little bit worried that she would move to India and not because that would be like a bad thing to do, but because it was really far away. Remember there was no internet. It was really expensive to call, but my father had no intention of ever going back. So that was not, she knew that wasn't the case.  

My mom's family was, I think pretty supportive. My grandmother's parents had been civil rights activists. They had in their retirement moved to Mississippi and among other things, got their house bombed by the Klan. So, they like, you know, kind of were comfortable. They had developed lots of interracial friendship doing that. And so, they weren't like super freaked out by this idea. And there's a story about my grandfather's father was from a teeny town in upstate New York. And he had all of these aunts who like, when I knew them, they were like pushing a hundred, all of them, right? Or the ones that lived were pushing a hundred and some neighbor was like, what does he think? What do they think about this thing that she's doing? And one of the great aunts who would have been at least in her seventies turned to this woman and said, Effie, you're not in your own home, which apparently is upstate New York, elderly white lady for shut up. 

A-lan: Yes. That's beautiful. [laughing]  

Samira: So, the family was on board on my mom's side and my dad was really the black sheep of his family. And so, they were relieved that anyone wanted to marry him and their main concern. And my dad was a complicated guy, but like he and my mom stayed married for almost 40 years ended with his death. He was a good, pretty good provider. I think he was a faithful husband, things like that. I mean, I wouldn't know, but my mother has never said anything that suggests that she doesn't think he was, right. Like he was a, he was a very loyal person, if complicated, but my dad's family, like my dad's father kind of figured out that Americans don't do dowry. And part of what a dowry is in India is it's a woman's insurance policy, right? Like it's what she'll have if something goes wrong in the marriage. And he actually liquidated some assets to make sure that my mom had just enough Indian jewelry, a, to hold up her head in the Indian community, because that's provided by the bride's family. And he knew that my grandparents, my American grandparents wouldn't, but also just in case something went wrong with the marriage so that she could go home to my father's family home, if she needed a place, like if he sort of like kind of a renegade child was not a good choice. So he was, they were pretty supportive. They were like surprised that someone was willing to take a risk on my dad.  

And, you know, I think my mom used to say that she thought the biggest difference between them was either gender, right? She was a woman, and he was a man, or that she was from the country, and he was from the city. I don't think that's true. I think there were a lot of things that sort of got brushed aside and maybe not dealt with well, a lot of places where my mom really just caved. Like on the one hand, we were living in my mother's country and there were lots of places where my father's like, this is your country. What do we do here? But a lot of places where my mom sort of caved in ways that she might not have, if she hadn’t been trying to be culturally sensitive. 

A-lan: Yeah. And you can feel that kind of that generosity and also that push and pull that compromise all the way throughout the book with their relationship, which I loved and also the sense of place. So, let's talk about where you grew up, New Haven, right next to obviously, you know, the suburbs of New Haven, I think. [Samira: Yeah.] So not right directly in the city.  

Samira: And that's an important thing to note from like racial and class standpoint, right? Like I like to sort of describe the economics of New Haven. There are sort of people who can't afford to live in the suburbs. And then there are people who can afford to pay the expensive city taxes and really expensive private school tuition. That's who lives in New Haven. We had enough money to be able to live in the suburbs, but not enough money to pay for private schools. 

A-lan: Got you. Thank you for that. Yeah, absolutely. We could go, we could have a whole conversation about the dynamics of New Haven. But you know, what I'm curious about for the book is your father's really sense of ownership of that space over time and how you talk about, especially in the relationship, that question of where are you from? Both you say this kind of cheeky, like they wanted to know where, you know, they wanted to know why I was brown or where I got my brown from, but also this real reverence that your father had over time of New Haven or this outside suburb of New Haven being more of his home over time than even India, his place of birth. So, could you talk about that relationship that was full of place?  

Samira: So, I think a couple of things are really important. Like my dad was a middle class and high caste person. So, he had a lot more status in India than he had in the United States. Now there are things about life that are easier in the United States. Like there's like more dependable electricity. You can drink all of the water, all of the places, stuff like that. But like he would have had a kind of posher life if he had stayed in India. And he really came because he believed in the American dream and he like believed in the American dream, you could do almost anything. And his belief in like the best part of the country, like never, I have a really clear memory of his hand coming down over my eyes as we were watching Rodney King be beaten on television. And my father still believed that this was America failing, but that the American dream was real, right?  

Like he came here, and he believed that he had picked the best place in the world to be. And he really loved for reasons that I don't totally know, New England. Like he felt really bad for people who did not get to live in Vermont, primarily himself. But like, and you know, I don't know that he was like super attached to our suburb. My parents were sort of like, they were the kind of people I'm really committed to living in cities as an adult. My parents, I think had this, like, again, they wanted the education. Like if we could have afforded private school, I think we would have lived in the cities, and they had that like push, pull. So, he was very attached to New Haven as a place. Very attached to New York, which was the city that we were closest to and had easiest access to and very attached to sort of other, Boston and Washington, DC and less to Philly, but I'm very attached to Philly. 

A-lan: Yeah. And I think at one point in the book, you actually talk about the architecture and kind of going and seeing those various, very colonial architectural moments. So, you know, obviously we're kind of naming Connecticut and New England, and I'm curious about, you know, we're going to go straight into it, but like white supremacy, histories of colonization, white dominant culture and how this particular negotiation within your family, but also how you're finding out and through your identity, how that came to play in relationship to place and identity.  

Samira: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things that's really complicated about growing up Asian in those early era of that early time of immigration is like, I think that my parents really believe on some level, first of all, I think they had this real hope that we were going to live in like not a racially blind society necessarily, like not a post-racial society, but a society of equality. And I don't think they thought through very well what would happen if that weren't going to happen. And I think that’s something that they in some ways could believe because my mother was white and my father was an immigrant. But also, like Asian, part of the deal with model minorities is first of all, they're sort of a, if you're invested in the model minority myth, you're a crappy ally, right? Because you, in order to be the model minority, you need there to be non-model minorities to set yourself in binary opposition to. My father was never that kind of person, right? Like my dad was really invested in everybody having a chance. But he really did believe that if we worked hard, like he thought that the discrimination he had in his life was from being an immigrant. And so, if we could be given the things he didn't have, he was really frustrated that I didn't go to an ivy league college, I went to Swarthmore College. So, I went to a perfectly fine school.  

A-lan: Not too bad, yeah. Right.  

Samira: But like, here we are. Like, and I was like, are you kidding? I'm not going to go Yale. Like I'm leaving. That's the point of college is to leave. Let's be super clear. But there was this sort of, if we can give them that they won't experience discrimination. And I think like, obviously, like when I think back, obviously I did in my childhood, but there wasn't a lot of sort of ability to name it and to call it out and to talk about it. And I had this really interesting experience, like in my 40s, in which I had an incident of really horrible racism that was too fresh and too painful for me to write about. It's not in the book. 

A-lan: Okay.  

Samira: And I was talking to a friend of mine about it. And I was feeling badly because like, she was sort of bringing up counter examples. And she was talking about growing up Black in the South and like had clearly had a much rougher time in a racialized context than I had had. And I just like felt bad for like telling her my pretty horrible experience, but like not really comparable. And later somebody said, sure, but part of a mentor, she and this friend and I have a mentor who is biracial herself, half Black and half white.  

And she said, sure, but she also had something you didn't have, which was a community that knew what she was going to face and knew how to lift her up and make her strong in the face of those things. Whereas I had a lot of protection from my mother's whiteness, especially when I was a child in her home. Like part of the thing was that I didn't have that protection as an adult, but also had been given no tools to navigate the world as a person of color. And sometimes like people frustrating my attempts even to like navigate my world. So, like I, for instance, at some point discovered that I always had to be at the bare minimum two hours early to any airport flight because after September 11th, that was what I needed. And I would have these fights with my white mother about like, it's not really time to leave yet. And it was because she didn't realize that what I had done was had developed a racialized understanding. And I couldn't understand why she, she was, she wasn't going to wait with me. She was going to drive me there and turn around and come back. Why do you care if you lose 10 to noon or 11 to one? Right? 

A-lan: Absolutely.  

Samira: And so, it was this interesting thing where you get protected by a lot of things by the whiteness. You get to, but immigrants want to believe that they came here to make their kids’ lives better, not to make them a racialized minority. So, there's a certain amount of gaslighting that is part of what they need to believe they gave all of this stuff up. It needs to be worth it. And then there's also nobody who knows how to be a person of color in the United States to help you learn how to do that. So, it's sort of an interesting experience.  

A-lan: Oh, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. I want to read just a little quote from the book that kind of speaks on these things. And maybe we can go a little bit deeper. So, you say this is actually an excerpt from page 95. White parents of non-white children can also be very resistant to thinking about racism in their children's lives. You say, my mother has said that she thought the world was changing and they thought that the US would grow into a truly multicultural society. So, I'm just curious about, you know, you're talking about both the idealism of we, you know, we we've come so far, we will continue to go so far, but then also the kind of dissonance of not even really understanding the nuances of racialized trauma, racialized identity, navigations, all of these things. And so, I'm curious to just dive in, you talk about, you know, that that relationship in particular with your mother, there's so many moments that comes up in the book, but I'm just, I'm curious about that particular family dynamic.  

Samira: Yeah. I mean, I think it's really important to say, first of all, I did not like talk to all of my relatives who appear in this book, but my mother had the opportunity to read the entire manuscript before I gave it to the editor. [A-lan: Okay!] She read the whole thing. She asked me to remove one adverb. I described her in one, I described her in some places as like, I'm talking about like being told by other Asian women, you can never trust a white woman. And I'm like, a white woman grew me in her body. A white woman like took out a second mortgage on her home to send me to college and sat up with me when I was sick and drove from Philadelphia the first time I had to put down a dog when I was 40. Like really don't trust this white woman. And I said, even though she has massively failed me at times on issues of race, she asked me to remove the word massive massively, massively. She said, can you just say I failed? And she had an explanation for why, but that was just a little bit too much. And I did, right. Like she's my mother. Of course I did. And it, you know, why also Strunk and White says remove all adverbs anyway. [A-lan laughs gently] Right. So like, and she, but that was the only thing she asked. She offered a couple of reflections that she didn't ask me to include, but I actually did. Like she said somewhere, you know, reading me talk about mentorship, she had no role models for interracial marriage or raising multiracial or biracial kids. Right. So, she, but she didn't ask me to say that she just sort of was amusing. And so, I think it's really important to say, and she said the book was her description of the book was that it was hard to read in places, but fair.  

A-lan: I could feel that. Yeah. I could feel that all throughout the book. Like, you know, there's it's all so complicated, you know the complication is, and the nuance is so all throughout, you know, the ways I really think that, for example, your mother, your portrayal of your mother was so generous, the ways that she both sacrifice, but also didn't get things quite right. But I think, I think that push and pull is so familiar to so many of us. And I think really speaks to the heart of the book, which is love, right? Racism, but also love and that tension that we have between those two, like very powerful forces in our lives, especially as folks of color navigating relationships with white people and love of white folks.  

Samira: Exactly. And like, one of the things that I think about is how on Earth do you teach your kids how to navigate something that you've never experienced?  

A-lan: And are awakening to a consciousness of in real time via the lives of your children.  

Samira: Of your children. And, and also, you know, I think that if she had married an American who was not white, an African American, someone Indigenous, I think if she had married someone who had grown up here is the point that I'm trying to get at. That person, like she's had conversations with my father about, for instance, when my father was a small child, he saw a lot of the violence. He was seven when India and Pakistan, when partition happened. And so, my mother has lots to say about that experience. My father told her about that, but my father didn't have an experience of being a little non-white kid. My father didn't have an experience of being not white in the United States and also not being a foreigner. And he, because he wanted to believe that immigrant myth about making your kids’ lives better, he wanted to believe that the discrimination he experienced was tied to his foreignness and not to his color, because it would mean that he wasn't saddling us with it. And then he died before I thought of that. So, I couldn't ask him, but that would be my guess.  

A-lan: Yeah. Could you talk about, this is an interesting question, but what's your opinion about, you know, criticality and lovers deciding to have children from these very different cultures that are saddled with all of this extra baggage. Should there be any criticality as we enter into relationships and bring about children from those relationships in a world that yes, has a lot of promise, but it's not quite there yet? I'm just curious about that perspective.  

Samira: So first of all, I don't have kids and I kind of feel like as a childless person, you kind of shouldn't judge other people like they're, but for the great, right? Like my parents really wanted kids. They really wanted kids. And I understand that, right? Like I didn't choose to be childless. I just sort of didn't have a time in my life when I was partnered and it felt like it was an appropriate thing to do and have never been brave enough to do it outside of the context of a partnership. So like, there's never been like the right person at the right time and in the right. And I think now like what would happen? And I'm at this point, probably too old to have kids, but what would I do in light of, for instance, the climate crisis? People bring kids into the world all of the time, knowing the climate crisis. And on the one hand, how brave. And on the other hand, how foolhardy. I think that's just like the human condition, right? Like that's just how it is.  

A-lan: Yeah. And I asked that question not to really poke or prod, but really to kind of, I think you do set that up at some moment. You even almost asked a version of that question as you're reflecting on the circumstances of your life, the misunderstandings, the deep amount of love. And so, I appreciate us breaching that subject, even as you recognize your own position within it.  

Samira: I wish they had thought harder and had better tools to think about what that would mean. And I wish that they had been taken a harder and more aggressive line with their relatives who did not make the choice. And as I said, they were all like really, really on board in theory, but then their skill set in practice is really different. And so, I wish that my parents had thought more concretely about when and how they would intervene, possibly actually even going on into adulthood.  

A-lan: Yeah. And we don't have systems of support for that at all. I mean, we really have systems of support for just navigating race, even as they don't always intersect, let alone when they're so deeply intertwined.  

Samira: Well, like one of my best tools, so something I didn't say earlier that I kind of wanted to is like one of the things my mom has said is like the word microaggression wasn't a word that she knew. It was, she's a woman, so I assume it's a concept that she had noticed, but she comes from a culture that thinks whining is terrible. And so, she wanted to protect us from getting reprimanded for whining. And so, she taught us not to talk about little things, but then how would she even know about the little things? Right? Like, so that was the kind of thing she just didn't know. And how do you figure out how to parse those things? Right? 

A-lan: Yeah.  

Samira: But what I was going to say is I have this amazing tool. So, one of my best friends is a white woman who goes to church with my mother and who is somebody who I really trust on racial issues. And so sometimes when my mom and I will be having an issue, I will call my friend up and I would be like, I need you to talk to my mom, white lady to white lady, [A-lan laughs] because like, I need to not have to deal with the white fragility right now. And I, and I need someone who can be gentler with her about it. Cause I need her to get there, and I can't do it. And my friend will always say, I can't call your mother and bring this up. But my mother is someone who I can say, mommy, I can't talk to you about this. Could you go talk to her?  

A-lan: Yeah, that's beautiful.  

Samira: And my mom trusts, we both trust her. She also teaches at the local university. I'm from New Haven. So, this is the person in question is a Yale professor. So, from church, they have the relationship of love and trust, but my mom is pretty impressed by my friend's pedigree. And so also, will listen to her, which is [A-lan Yeah, totally.] totally helpful.  

A-lan: Yeah. Well, I want to go back to you and kind of bring it back to you. You go across and bring so many different elements of your life into this book, which I so appreciate. And I kind of want to go back earlier in the book as you talk through your vegetarianism and like the kind of stark boundaries around that vegetarianism. But for me, I'm also really curious about how it connects you to it, how it embodiedly connected you to this culture that you actually didn't know anything about. You talked about your father's caste earlier, which comes up in these questions of vegetarianism, but also this kind of rich culture, rich Indian Pakistani culture that is illuminated through your vegetarian journey. So could you talk about the role of not the role of meat, but the role of non-meat in your life and how that speaks to like Doxa, all these beautiful concepts you bring up.  

Samira: Sure. So, I first became vegetarian at four. My sister had gotten a stuffed lamb that got called Lamby for Easter. And we had, and my mom often made lamb for Easter. And we had just been on a farm where there had been lambs. And I somehow had like, I knew the word beef and I knew the word cow, but I did not know that beef was cow. And somehow, I knew the words rooster and hen for animals, [A-Ian: But not chicken.] but not chicken for food and pig and pork. Right. So like, I had no idea, lamb, it was very bad. I figured it out. I stopped eating meat. I was also four. So, it wasn't like I was going to eat other things. And so, when I decided that Thanksgiving turkey had maybe died of old age, my mom said, yes, maybe it did. Because she was like starting to panic about nutrition. Because I think I was trying to live off of plain pasta.  

A-lan: Of course.  

Samira: And when I was eleven, I went to visit an aunt and uncle and the aunt’s an ecologist, and at the time they were vegetarian. And that was when I really realized that like, I don't think I realized like what slaughterhouses are like and stuff. But that was when I was like, oh, meat does not die of old age. And I think I hadn't like revisited it. It wasn't that I like at eleven thought we were eating things that had dropped dead precisely. I just like hadn't revisited it. And so, I stopped. And I've at times eaten fish sort of grudgingly. There are some stories about how and why that happened. I really like fish for one thing. And I don't really, every now and then I'll have like shellfish now, but don't really eat fish now.  

But I, if you ask me why I'm vegetarian, I sound like I was at Swarthmore College in the late 90s, which makes sense. I was at Swarthmore College in the late 90s. I'll talk to you about animal rights. I'll talk to you about environmentalism. I'll talk to you about sort of small carbon footprints, all of the things that you might assume. I’d sort of talk to you about health and nutrition, but I'm remarkably willing to eat like Kraft macaroni and cheese. [A-Ian: Yes.] [A-Ian laughs] So I do think it's healthier to be vegetarian, but like, I'm not good at that platonic ideal. But I want everything super separated. Like really separate. I don't like, like, I will eat in a place where I can see something being cooked on a grill that has cooked meat if I feel stuck. But like when I had a grill in the school where I was teaching where that was how it was, I wouldn't eat that because I wouldn't like let that be part of my regular practice. Like I really want things separate. I once had a friend show up with meat, but also with an entirely separate grill at a cookout. 

A-lan: Yeah, you mentioned that in the book.  

Samira: Yeah. And like, so to me, I did not think of that as something in my life that came out of Indianness. For one thing, I know lots of non-Indian vegetarians, black, white, brown for reasons other than India people also don't like things to touch. And so, I hadn't associated that. And then in the book, I talk about this day when my aunt like moves a ladle from a pot of soup that has meat in it. [A-Ian: To the veg dish, yep.] And, I like that was it. I like, and I was furious with her. And like, if that happened, if I were a guest at your home and that happened, I would eat it. But I was like in my mother's house, I had done a lot. I had cooked the vegetarian soup. I had access to peanut butter. I was like, I'm not going to do this. And I was really mad because it's a situation in which very few people are thinking about like as they do these big holiday meals, what I'm going to eat. And I had had a boyfriend who was at these holidays for a long time, who would you think about that. And so, and then, then we broke up, and he wasn't there. And so, no one was thinking about that anymore. And I had to think about it. And I was really mad. For some reasons that have to do with like, but I wasn't going to eat the food. But some of the reasons I were angry also like had to do with this well of grief about the boyfriend and like blah, blah, blah, right. So, my mom explained that when I was a really little kid, we would go to- we went to more Indian events when I was little than when I was older- functions. 

A-lan: Yeah, functions.  

Samira: Yes. Yes. And she taught us not to move the spoons around. And I write about these two half Indian sisters in the book. And I don't think I write about how when I talk to them about this, they were like, right, the streams never cross, never cross the streams. There's like lots of Star Wars analogies in it. And she said, like, when they learned about keeping kosher, it all made sense. Even though it was super different, right? Like never. This is a really important cultural thing.  

And so, I didn't know it was something that I did because I was Indian. And I still don't know that it is, right. Like I've got a really, really close friend who is granted Jewish and therefore has the kosher keeping vegan. I once brought cheese into her house and didn't let it touch her plates because I wasn't sure how she would feel about that. But I know she doesn't want her food touching meat, right? Like, just doesn't. So obviously, non-Indians can feel that way.  

So first of all, part of being mixed race is never knowing, like, is this some piece of my heritage popping up that I didn't know about? Or am I like one of those Western vegetarians who feel strongly about this? [A-Ian: Yeah, how do you root these values?] Right. Because, you know, you sort of ask about doxa, which is this cultural sense of what is and isn't appropriate. And like, part of the point of doxa is you kind of can't pull yourself out of it to know. To like get a bird's eye view. You can't, it's like oxygen, you can't, you don't think about the fact that you've got oxygen unless you don't, right?  

And so, I wasn't connecting this to my Indianness. But I'm constantly being told that I'm not Indian enough. And my vegetarianism, which I did kind of associate with Indianness, like not the separation thing. My Indian family doesn't have a lot of patience for it, which I find real, I've always found really frustrating because they think I'm not Indian enough, but they're impatient with the most Indian part of my personality. And so, my mom's point about how I'm vegetarian made me even more frustrated with that. But it also raised questions for me. So, my father is from a pretty high caste. Unfortunately, for everyone listening, also a caste that I don't know how to pronounce because it's got like this slam up of consonants at the beginning. But it turns out, and again, I learned this in my forties, that the kind of strict purity stuff that matters so much to me, and it matters to me in this like, deeply embodied, I'm grossed out, and I think I might throw up kind of way.  

A-lan: Yeah, you're talking about a very misruly thing.  

Samira: Right? This is like, I have lots of moral reasons for being vegetarian. This is more like, if you asked me to like, I don't know, lick the bottom of a shoe that had stepped in gum and dog poop. Right? Like, that's how I feel. It's gross to me. And like, it's not gross to me to watch you eat it. I can't explain that part, right? Like, like, sometimes it is, or sometimes it's painful. I once left, not broke up with, but like walked out on a boyfriend who wanted to eat rabbit and I had missed that he had ordered rabbit. And I like couldn't watch him do it. So, I like left him in the restaurant.  

But um, so I learned that all of this separation stuff, and even the vegetarianism is tied to caste in India. And not only is it tied to caste, but it's actually a tool used by upper castes to beat up on lower caste people. It's like a tool of caste suppression. So, for me, this then raises a ton of questions. I did not know this piece of the culture. I'm not even sure that my culture is why I'm vegetarian. Like I said, I know lots of white people who are vegetarian that way. I know lots of Black people who are vegetarian that way. Does it maybe I'm like that kind of American vegetarian? How do I know?  

Um, am I and, and like, I didn't know that I had picked up this behavioral trait. I like I said, I still don't really know. So, I think that if you discover a proximity to white supremacy in your behavior, that you didn't know was there, you have a moral obligation to try to correct and change your behavior. Do I have a moral obligation to stop being vegetarian? In this way, in my own home? Like, do I have a moral obligation to let people bring meat to a potluck in my house? Now that I know this, does it matter that I'm Jewish and my kitchen is a dairy kitchen? And I don't have meat dishes because I don't eat meat. And now this entire utterly separate cultural practice will come cascading down. Like where are my moral obligations? Does it matter that I, to the best of my knowledge, never used vegetarianism to beat up on a lower caste person? Because like, I don't know, like that's a I didn't know that that was a way of policing caste boundaries, right? [A-Ian: Mhm.] So to me, it asks all of these interesting questions that I don't have answers to.  

A-lan: Yeah, but it forces you to do that kind of self-interrogation. And again, like, where do you root your culture has a way of rooting us in our values and our morals. And when those cultures are plentiful, and then also sometimes conflicting, you know, it really does make that harder to navigate that sense of belonging, that sense of cultural understanding, that sense of community as well.  

Samira: Right. 

A-lan: Well, I wanted to know also to how does cultural appropriation versus cultural exchange, which you talk about much later in the book? How does that also kind of complicate this question of where am I rooting myself culturally in this Americanized, you know, very multicultural type of landing, but also the cultural specificity of your father's family, your Indian identity. 

Samira: So, like, a couple of things come to mind. And like one, I don’t do yoga. I have a really bad back. I really should do yoga. It would be good for me. I don't do yoga, because every single time some white lady in like fancy, fancy yoga pants says, Namaste. I um. It's not even that I'm like, boycotting on principle, it's that I get so viscerally angry every time it happens, that all of my muscles tense up and the entire hour that I just spent, like being remarkably bad at being embodied, just disappears.  

A-lan: Like, it's like moving ladel.  

Samira: Exactly. Like, now we're done.  

A-lan: And why? I mean, that's interesting to wrestle with again. That's complex. So, I would love you to go deeper.  

Samira: It's super complex, right? Like, and I think it's all sorts of things, right? It's like annoying to go into a yoga studio and hear, like, Sanskrit chants that you know, nobody knows how to say. The reality is that it's not like people speak Sanskrit in India, right? Like, it's like people going it's it is not dissimilar to go into a Latin Mass if you're Catholic, but like, and it's not yet Vatican to write, you might learn Latin, you might know what these things mean, you also might not. But it's sort of this. It's… I think it's tied to how those spaces treat brownness. And here I am pulling from the work of someone named Amanda Lucia, who studies like, places like Burning Man, and there's something called Shakti Fest. And she observes that these spaces which draw hugely on meditation traditions, coming out of Buddhism, and yoga traditions, coming out of Hinduism. And both of those have the other two, right? But on, on Asian religious traditions are as white as white supremacist rallies. And she makes this observation. Now, there are two things that we should be getting out of this. The first is that there are people of color at white supremacist rallies, which just like blew my mind. What is wrong with those people? But these spaces that draw deeply from Asian traditions are almost devoid of Asian bodies.  

A-lan: Yeah.  

Samira: And I think it's because and she argues that it's because like, I think this in part because she thinks this and makes a really good case for it. What people want is they want to extract traditions and practices that feel meaningful for them. And then they want to leave all of the other cultural baggage behind. Christianity, Christianity has contemplative practice, you do not need to go to Buddhism to learn how to quiet your mind. There's this thing called the adoration of the sacrament or of the host, where you like sit and hang out with a wafer in the middle of the night. That- there's Quakerism. There's lots of quiet Christian stuff. Um, people, however, want to sort of like say like Christianity is misogynistic, Christianity is homophobic. Christianity is white supremacist Christianity, all of which are true. Nobody's arguing any of that.  

But they want to say like, Hinduism is this pure thing. Hinduism has all of these Goddesses, shakti, is the feminine notion of the divine. Hinduism is also supporting a patriarchal structure that results in women getting torched with gasoline when their parents can't like continue giving bride price. Right? Like Hinduism is a human system that has misogyny, that has patriarchy, that has homophobia, that has caste, that has all sorts of things, right? And they want to say that's not real Hinduism, just this beautiful thing that we've extracted. So, if I show up, and I don't actually, to the best of my knowledge, have homophobic uncles, I do not want to slander any of my uncles by saying they're homophobic. I do not believe them to be.  

But like, if I show up, and I certainly had a misogynistic patriarchal grandfather, right? Like, with those stories, I once asked one of my uncles what my grandmother died of. And his answer was your grandfather. So, if I show up with that family story, I'm undoing your idea that Hinduism really. And that's an active extraction, right? And so, if we live in a settler colonial place, India is a place that for centuries had extraction colonialism. And so all of that pain, all of the pain that my family has because of partition, all of the pain of being a colonized people, the fact that every single time the Queen of England shows up in her crown, I guess the late Queen of England shows up in her crown, I'm looking at Indian jewels, all of that, all of that pain exists in the white yoga studio. Where I can't afford the right clothes, in part because I don't have generational wealth, in part because my father came to this country with $8. And also, because my parents sent money back to India for my entire childhood, such that my parents don't have the wealth that they could have amassed themselves. So, I have student loan debt that keeps me from being able to buy the expensive yoga pants in this space, right? Like all of that is, I think, and to me, so that's appropriation. And it's not, and it's all of those levels, right? That doesn't mean you couldn't have a decolonial yoga practice. A friend of mine and colleague, Shrinda Gandhi, wrote something about decolonizing your yoga practice. She got mocked by Tucker Carlson for it too, for writing this.  

A-lan: Oh, you know it's good. [laughs] 

Samira: That's how you know she was onto something, right? But like, it's not that it's impossible. It's that it doesn't, nobody in that space is thinking of that's what they're doing, right? But all of that culture is layered onto it. All of that is there. And I think that's really fundamentally different than if you and I get to know each other really well. And I want you to participate in some sort of life cycle ritual in my life and ask you to wear a sari for it and make sure that you have the appropriate underwear.  

I write in the book, for the people who haven't read the book about a bunch of white ladies and saris and not the appropriate underwear, and make sure that someone helps you put it on elegantly and you know, gives you, and you're wearing it in participation of something. I think it's different. My mother has not worn Indian clothes outside of a family function since my father died. But I also think it's really different. I don't, I wish she would, I wish she felt comfortable doing so. She feels like people would look at her weird and think she was appropriating. But I think that she spent 40 years as an Indian man's wife with all of the gender, right? Like I think of Indian culture as a very patriarchal culture. She learned how to be a wife and a daughter in that culture. And she can wear, wrap a sari well enough that you can swing dance in it and still basically look pretty okay. I think she has every bit as much right as I do just because of my skin. I can't wrap a sari, I don't wear saris because I can't put them on to her standard, right? S 

o, one of those things is exchange. Or here in Denver, I have a good friend who works in refugee resettlement. She knows where all of the really good ethnic food from countries that she's resettled people are. And she usually like knows the owners of the restaurants because often they are refugees. It's not appropriation for her to go spend money in those places. Where I think it gets sticky and I write about this in the book.  

So, I lived in DC for a year. And there was a market in there's a neighborhood in DC called Eastern Market that indeed has a market. And in this market, there was a woman selling both traditional African outfits and sort of skirts that were traditionally African but in the end, like they’re circle skirts, they're not fundamentally all that different from a skirt made out of African fabric. And I think she was Nigerian based both on her accent and on a Nigerian student of mine identifying one of the skirts as Nigerian. And I thought really, I loved this fabric, and I really wanted these skirts. And I thought really hard about whether or not I could buy one. It was she was sewing right there. I don't think she like had some sort of sweatshop operation going on. She was charging what I thought was a I know so I'm not very good at it, but she was charging really high, particularly for me prices that I thought were fair representations of tailored clothing. Black immigrant woman owned business. I wanted to spend I wanted to own these skirts and I wanted to support her in her business politically.  

So, I bought two skirts, and I carefully bought one of the skirts has a tie kind of waist thing that is like maybe a little bit less common in the United States. Although I do have a couple of skirts like that that are like made out of Calico. [A-Ian: Mhm.] And one skirt that's like a circle skirt. It could be this pattern could be from anywhere in the world. I wore them a couple of times and really excited a Nigerian student who was thrilled. [A-Ian: Yes.] And then I was like, is this cultural appropriation? Should I be doing this? Like, I'm not Nigerian.  

And I like wrote this entire essay. And I was nervous, like, because I was sort of saying like, I think my mom should be able to wear a sorry, my colleague in the office next to mine is a critical race scholar. And she pointed out that because I don't live in a white body. I also take on a risk when I wear foreign clothing, that white women who are like, wearing like clothing as costume, don't. And also, because I had picked skirts, I picked clothing that I know how to wear. So, I also wasn't doing anything rude. Like I wasn't being sloppy.  

A-lan: Like some kind of traditional red head wrapper.  

Samira: Yeah, I understand exactly right. Like I hadn't picked and like had actually been offered one when I was buying them for like an additional fee and had decided not to, even though like I frequently sort of in a quite hippie lady way, in the way of my mother's people will wear like a kerchief. Right. And sometimes in the way of my father's people will pull a jupata over my head in particular settings, mostly to keep my part from getting sunburned. But like, exactly right. Like it's a skirt. So, I know how to do it. And she sort of pointed these things out. She didn't say either she thought I could or not. She just was adding a layer of complexity. So, I have like $400 worth of skirts, two skirts, $400 in my closet that like, I will never get rid of because they're beautiful, but I'm like totally unsure what to do with. 

A-lan: Yeah. I mean, I wonder, I mean, one of the things that keeps coming up across our conversation is what it takes to really be in meaningful community and with differences of culture is like a real criticality, like a real practice of thinking about what you're doing and also extending care into what you're doing right now. Not just care of the culture, but care of the communities and the histories that bear and steward that culture. Am I tracking that correctly? Or I just want to make sure there were a little bit.  

Samira: Yeah. Well, and I have like, so I also have Lakota star quilts on my bed that I bought at Pine Ridge reservation. So, I know that they were not like sort of sold in some sort of touristy kind of setting. Right. And I kind of asked around friends in Indigenous studies, some are Indigenous and some of whom are not, and they were like, you bought them from the artist who made them and you paid a like good. They were like, what did you pay? You paid what is sort of the rate for that kind of art, usable art. You're good. It's also private in my house and nobody else can see it and think I'm performing. So, I feel better about the quilts on my bed than I do about the skirts that I would be wearing out in public, not because of my friends, my colleagues point about my safety, but because, because it's private.  

A-lan: Yeah. Absolutely. So as we, as we like kind of often lift up this idea, ideal of a multicultural kind of, you know, whether it's salad bowl or melting pot, whichever we  you know, point of locusts we want to hold on to, you know, when you think about the future and think about progress, what does that feel and look like to you, especially as someone who's holding both of these identities and, and really thinking through what that means within your body, within yourself, within your lineage and legacies. So, what does a future feel like for you that feels actually progressive in the ways that. 

Samira: So, what I'm thinking about right now, as you asked that question is those skirts in my closet and the shirt that I'm wearing right now, those skirts are better than this shirt. This shirt was almost certainly made in the sweatshop by child labor. I know that, right? I think it's from White House, Black Market or something like that. Right. I wish we could live in a world in which that was what mattered, right? Like the labor practices and things like that. But in order to live in that world, you need to live in a world in which A- nobody's wandering around in a sari without appropriate underwear. 

A-lan: Appropriate cultural context.  

Samira: Right. Like where you, and you also need to live in a world in which nobody's wandering around in like a kurta that they bought at urban outfitters. Right. Like what makes me comfortable with those shirts, although clearly not comfortable enough to wear them on the regular, is the money that I spent, right? Like the labor practices that I was supporting, the fact that I paid an artist a good wage for it or good. It's not a wage ‘cause I bought the product I didn't pay for the time. But that is the kind of thing that I would like to live in a world where the power balances were like, you can't do anything about the historical power imbalance that will always be with us. But in which the real power imbalances in the world that we're living in, in which you and I could walk down the street as safe as white women and white women could walk down the street as safe as white men. And we don't live in that world, right? But that's the kind of world that I feel we would need to really sort of be like, what is reasonable, fair exchange.  

A-lan: Absolutely. And what about the racism of people who, who love you feels important in 2023, this moment when we've kind of had a recent racial, racial awakening, where we have definitely more language around oppression? What does it mean for you now in this moment? And, and, you know, how are you taking that into this present?  

Samira: I wish I were more optimistic about our recent racial reckoning. I wish I felt like it had more lasting change. I think that what I wanted to do, though, was I wanted to write against cancel culture. People are really complicated. And if you make it too scary to learn and grow from mistakes, then people, so the title of the book, the racism of people who love you, is a story about a horrible fight that I had with my best friend, in which I accused him of being racist, because he had been being racist. It's a crapshoot who was more hurt, because for a good white progressive, calling him racist is like the worst thing I could possibly have said to him. He is, however, a Southern Presbyterian, and I am a like Connecticut Yankee, so everyone repressed their feelings. We had a basically actually pretty lovely friendship for the next seven years until we talked about it. He drove me to my father's funeral after I called him a racist. He, after I called him a racist and before we talked about it, paid for me, paid for therapy for me when I didn't have health insurance that would cover it, and really felt like I needed it.  

And then when we talked about it, seven years later, I had calmed down, and he had thought a huge amount about it and had learned and had grown. I'm not saying that's always the answer, right? That was a really, really, really close friendship. And when the thing that caused the fight happened, we had been really close friends for 15 years, and there had been a lot of trust already in that friendship. I'm not saying that you should never cut someone out of your life because they say something awful, but the reality is that we are all products of a white supremacist society. [A-Ian: Absolutely.] We're all products of a misogynistic, patriarchal, heteronormative society. We all make huge mistakes.  

I don't know, over the course of this friendship in which I accused him of racism, he's never accused me of heterosexism or homophobia. That does not mean that I've never demonstrated internalized homophobia to him. I don't want to be canceled for that. And well, the horrible fight was at a moment when he was not in a place where he could be called in. And I'm pretty sure in that moment I was too angry to be calling in. I think I was calling out. But I just think, I think Loretta Ross is one of the wisest community organizers and activists I've ever heard. And I think that when she talks about calling people in, that's what you want to do. You want to have a healthy enough sense of yourself that you can call other people in when they make mistakes. You want to have a healthy enough sense of yourself that when you get called in, you can assess the call in and grow and change. And also, everybody needs a healthy enough sense of self that they know when to give up on calling somebody in when it's not working and walk away. And they also know that not every time somebody calls you in, they're going to be right.  

You really need to listen in those moments, but they're not always right. Somebody who, if somebody gave my mom shit for being a white lady in a sari, I don't think they'd be right because she was an Indian wife and daughter-in-law for 40 years and has been a mother of Indian people for 45 years. But that requires a lot of strength. And I don't think it's strength that we always have. And so, I also think that we need to both be gentle with ourselves and each other when we fail. And those of us who are in marginalized positions need to know that we don't need to be gentle and forgiving and extending forever and ever and ever world without it.  

A-lan: Thank you so much. You've just taken us through so many wisdoms. I appreciate that care. I appreciate that criticality. You know, I do. Thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself with us, not only over this hour, but in the beautiful pages of your book, which again, I read and listened to. I just encourage everybody to get your book, to spend time with it, but then also to use this as an inspiration to spend time with yourselves and your communities. I would like to say, if I may, thank you. 

Samira: And I would like to say, if I may, thank you. You know, I'm all about the selling of the books, but remember your independent bookstores are your friends and your libraries are your friends. Do not buy my book if you cannot afford my book. Go and ask your library to get it for you. And also, it's not cheaper on Amazon than it will be at your bookstore or not by much. And I also wanted to thank you. The questions that you've asked and the questions that we didn't get to. You read my book with such care. Thank you for that gift.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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