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An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
by Nishta J. Mehra
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 son, 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 young son from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating him on the realities and dangers of being a black male 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.
"Starred Review. This insightful, searching book will appeal to anyone contemplating race, family, or growing into oneself." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. 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." - Library Journal
"Full of a wide range of insight and emotion, these essays effectively show the difficulties of being a mixed-race, same-sex family in America." - Kirkus
This information about Brown White Black was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 son, Shiv, in Phoenix.
She is the author of The Pomegranate King, a collection of essays.
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