(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)February 10, 2023

“The Racism of People Who Love You: What it Means not to be Like Your Family” with Dr. Samira Mehta

Monday, April 3 at 1:00 – 2:30 PM in Friends Hall, Ramapo College
Come join the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Ramapo College Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Compliance, and Ramapo Hillel in celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month!

Pizza and refreshments will be served.

Register here to join us via Zoom

Reading from, and talking about, the themes of her book The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging, Samira Mehta will turn her scholarly training on the subject of her own life in order to think about what it meant to grow up with multiple cultures. In her case, this often meant being cultural comfortable where she was racially uncomfortable and racially comfortable where she was culturally uncomfortable, but rarely both racially and culturally comfortable at the same time. She thinks about being an American in immigrant contexts and a brown person in white spaces. She asks what it means to have racism in your most close and loving relationships, to participating in a culture that you do not understand, and to have to code-switch in your daily family life. She does not have answers to these questions, but she hopes that she has funny stories to tell along the way, and that everyone leaves with new insights into their own lives and the questions that they want to ask.

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (UNC, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. Her newly released book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon, 2023) appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” Mehta’s current academic book project, “God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America” examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present and is under contract with the UNC Press. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called “A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States.” Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of “Color: Histories and Futures.” She is a member of the board of Feminist Studies in Religion, where she serves as the co-editor of the blog; co-chairs the steering committee of the North American Religions Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion; and is a Creative Editor at the journal American Religion. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Emory University.

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