Brown White Black

An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

By: Nishta J. Mehra

Narrated 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 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 her child from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating Shiv on the realities and dangers of being black 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.

"Brown White Black is a beautiful memoir about the blending of a family, filled with different cultures and backgrounds, defying social norms and expectations about what a “normal” family should be." -- BookRiot

Thoughtful and profound essays

I adored this collection of thoughtful, thought-provoking, and profound essays on life, family, race, sexuality, gender, parenting, and so much more.

Nishta Mehra has a unique voice, unflinchingly honest yet kind, and she is using it to offer others a perspective on life we might not see or appreciate fully.

So many of these essays gave me opportunities to think on my privilege and preconceived notions of race, sexuality, and gender in always that were at times uncomfortable but that discomfort is key for growth.