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One of her earliest memories still stings.
Nishta Mehra was “about seven or eight years old” when she
was shopping with her mother and a little boy called her the
n-word. She cried then, not because she was black but
because she wasn’t.
As the child of parents from India, Mehra is “brown” but she
“came of age not fully at home in either black or white
spaces.” She was an only child with few other Indians
nearby, and she had to blaze her own trails through whatever
discomforts she might feel in social, religious, and
cultural situations – something that was exacerbated when
she went to college and she “realized that I was queer.”
Today, Mehra’s life is “complicated.”
Her internal narrative always included children but never a
wedding. While in college, though, she met a white woman who
became her professor, then her partner, then her wife.
Nineteen years Mehra’s senior, Jill had assumed that she’d
never have children, until the idea of adoption became so
appealing that the two women carefully searched for a
gay-friendly agency.
Nine months later, they were the mothers of a black baby
boy.
It takes a lot of restraint to continue to kindly answer
questions about being “a two-mom, three-color family,” says
Mehra. People say things that are hurtful or that make her
angry but that’s also given her a better awareness of the
privilege she had and of the institutions and limitations of
gender assumptions and roles and of racism in America.
“I often wonder if what feels so essential to me now,” she
muses, “would still be on our radar if we did not have a
black son.”
Sticks and stones, as the playground saying goes, are more
damaging than mere words. It’s a retort that author Nishta
J. Mehra disputes, but conflictingly so.
While so very valuable as an entry into the national
conversation on the meaning of language and family, Brown
White Black may also seem somewhat rant-like. Mehra
makes many excellent points: in how she shouldn’t have to
explain her life, her son’s life, his love of “girly”
things, or her shorn head; on why she allows him certain
freedoms; on having children, and the panoply of choices.
But then, curiously, she questions the choices of others
in childrearing, friend-making, and mundane things like “car
sticker families,” focusing particularly on language (“words
matter”) and seemingly refusing to allow for even the
slightest of natural human awkwardness.
“We’re making it up as we go,” says Mehra on gay marriage,
and that’s a sentence to remember if you tackle this book.
Brown White Black is certainly a thought-provoking
look at modern American families but for some readers, it
just won’t fit.
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