WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:03.715
[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation.
00:03.875 --> 00:11.482
[SPEAKER_00]: In conjunction with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, Apari, and the Institute for Religion Media and Civic Engagement.
00:27.186 --> 00:29.187
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay there, can you come down here for a minute?
00:29.847 --> 00:34.208
[SPEAKER_01]: My son, my only child, was packing to leave for college, 3,000 miles away.
00:35.148 --> 00:37.709
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like my heart wasn't just outside my body.
00:38.229 --> 00:42.870
[SPEAKER_01]: It was packing two suitcases and a backpack and preparing to leave for California.
00:43.910 --> 00:48.491
[SPEAKER_01]: In the days before his departure, we were all trying to make sure he didn't forget anything.
00:49.392 --> 00:51.552
[SPEAKER_01]: And that he was ready to live away from home.
00:52.212 --> 00:54.733
[SPEAKER_01]: Clear across the country for the first time.
00:56.262 --> 01:03.006
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have much time, he said, as we sat down in the living room, I need to stop by school and then go see one of my teachers for the last time.
01:03.766 --> 01:09.810
[SPEAKER_01]: He's 18, a young adult, six feet tall, with long, wavy hair and a deep voice.
01:11.115 --> 01:17.637
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat down, ready for yet another conversation from me about how the world works and how it might see him.
01:18.297 --> 01:23.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Though he's used to it by now, he still listens with respect and patience.
01:23.718 --> 01:24.738
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this kid.
01:25.759 --> 01:29.720
[SPEAKER_01]: There are conversations you expect to have before your child leaves for college.
01:30.020 --> 01:39.742
[SPEAKER_01]: You talk about classes, you talk about money, you talk about laundry, broom mates, bad decisions, good decisions, and all the practical realities of becoming an adult.
01:41.830 --> 01:47.694
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there are the conversations you know you need to have, but aren't sure how they'll land.
01:48.775 --> 01:52.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Before kid or left for Berkeley, I had one of those conversations.
01:53.798 --> 02:01.764
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't about academics, it wasn't about time management, it wasn't about making friends, it was about his identities.
02:02.978 --> 02:06.645
[SPEAKER_01]: and what it might cause him to be open about them.
02:07.526 --> 02:12.275
[SPEAKER_01]: If you tell people your Hindu, some people may make assumptions about that.
02:13.485 --> 02:13.965
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what?
02:14.526 --> 02:18.990
[SPEAKER_01]: They may assume you support political movements you've never supported.
02:19.530 --> 02:23.814
[SPEAKER_01]: They may decide who you are before they know anything about you.
02:24.674 --> 02:29.178
[SPEAKER_01]: He said quietly, I could see him thinking, I continued.
02:30.039 --> 02:35.423
[SPEAKER_01]: If you tell people your Christian or that you go to church, people are going to make a different set of assumptions.
02:36.464 --> 02:56.697
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what he said, they may assume you're politically conservative, they may assume you oppose LGBTQ rights, they may assume you have certain views about abortion, gender, science, some people may hear the word Christian and immediately place you into a category that doesn't actually fit who you are.
02:57.658 --> 02:58.218
[SPEAKER_01]: He nodded.
02:59.679 --> 03:03.241
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth is some people will see Hindu and think they already know
03:06.762 --> 03:08.163
[SPEAKER_01]: and think they already know you.
03:09.184 --> 03:15.449
[SPEAKER_01]: In both cases, they're often responding to stereotypes, not to the person standing in front of them.
03:16.469 --> 03:17.030
[SPEAKER_01]: I paused.
03:19.031 --> 03:22.134
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not telling you this, so you'll hide who you are, I said.
03:23.114 --> 03:27.598
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm telling you because I want you to understand the landscape you're walking into.
03:28.626 --> 03:32.128
[SPEAKER_01]: Your job is to decide when and how you want to explain yourself.
03:32.668 --> 03:36.510
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes people will be curious, sometimes they'll make assumptions.
03:37.131 --> 03:38.551
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they'll get it wrong.
03:39.672 --> 03:43.854
[SPEAKER_01]: Because there's something that worries me when I think about young people and identity.
03:44.935 --> 03:47.456
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that they change, it's not that they grow.
03:47.797 --> 03:50.098
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not even that they leave traditions behind.
03:51.329 --> 04:03.534
[SPEAKER_01]: What worries me is when young people feel pressure to hide a part of themselves, not because they've examined it, and decided it no longer fits, but because somebody else has already decided what those identities mean.
04:05.035 --> 04:16.219
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we're serious about helping young people become fully themselves, then we have to create spaces where they can discover who they are before the world tells them who they're supposed to be.
04:16.879 --> 04:19.501
[SPEAKER_01]: That's especially true for mixed faith kids.
04:21.822 --> 04:31.909
[SPEAKER_01]: I want mixed kids to be able to show up in the world as mixed in ways that feel right to them, in which they feel whole and adjusted and authentically themselves.
04:32.849 --> 04:37.472
[SPEAKER_01]: I said to Kiddar, your identity isn't a debate for other people to win.
04:37.953 --> 04:45.438
[SPEAKER_01]: Your Hindu, your Christian, your Indian, your white, your all of those things at the same time.
04:46.187 --> 04:52.370
[SPEAKER_01]: The people worth knowing are the ones who are willing to listen long enough to understand the whole story.
05:29.852 --> 05:31.273
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Dr. Kathy Joshee.
05:31.633 --> 05:34.034
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a scholar of race, religion, and education.
05:34.395 --> 05:45.481
[SPEAKER_01]: A tenure professor who has spent two decades teaching about and studying how identity actually gets formed, not just in textbooks, but in kitchens, classrooms, and car rides home.
05:46.282 --> 05:56.988
[SPEAKER_01]: I've written six books, including White Christian Privilege, the illusion of religious equality in America, teaching for diversity in social justice, and Asian Americans in Dixie.
05:57.648 --> 06:01.111
[SPEAKER_01]: I've spoken to audiences from university lecture halls to the White House.
06:01.812 --> 06:04.995
[SPEAKER_01]: But this podcast isn't just research, it's personal.
06:05.635 --> 06:08.998
[SPEAKER_01]: It's where the scholarship and lived experience meet.
06:09.819 --> 06:10.900
[SPEAKER_01]: This is mixed.
06:27.207 --> 06:29.308
[SPEAKER_01]: Identity isn't a fixed thing you have.
06:29.668 --> 06:34.210
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something you build inside an environment, and that environment can change.
06:35.090 --> 06:43.073
[SPEAKER_01]: A mixed race kid at her grandmother's house is not the same self as the mixed race kid at her father's office party.
06:43.493 --> 06:44.694
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not confusion.
06:45.114 --> 06:47.275
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how identity actually works.
06:48.295 --> 06:52.337
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a list of variables that function as a web.
06:53.403 --> 07:02.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Family, community, geography, generation, gender, physical appearance, language, name, peer group.
07:04.221 --> 07:07.123
[SPEAKER_01]: The point isn't that anyone decides who you are.
07:07.363 --> 07:12.747
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is that identity emerges from how these variables interact.
07:13.748 --> 07:15.609
[SPEAKER_01]: A few are worth lingering on.
07:16.810 --> 07:29.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Fina type, what others see when they look at you, a mixed person who reads this white moves through the world differently than one who reads this black, no matter how they identify themselves.
07:30.300 --> 07:42.160
[SPEAKER_01]: Rays is partly assigned by what other people see, that shapes which identities feel available, which feel policed, which feel safe, and which feel like home.
07:43.431 --> 07:55.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Family was race talked about in the family, how was it talked about, which hereticis got named, which got downplayed, which grandparents lived in the house and which lived a continent away.
07:56.074 --> 08:06.257
[SPEAKER_01]: A biracial kid whose Korean grandmother helped race him grew up in a different ecology than a biracial kid whose Korean grandparents were a phone call across the ocean.
08:07.238 --> 08:07.979
[SPEAKER_01]: geography.
08:08.579 --> 08:12.764
[SPEAKER_01]: Being mixed in Hawaii is not the same as being mixed in Alabama.
08:13.244 --> 08:19.371
[SPEAKER_01]: Being mixed in 1985 was not the same as being mixed is in 2025.
08:20.272 --> 08:29.522
[SPEAKER_01]: Local history, who lives there, who holds power, who's been excluded, shapes, which mixed identities are even visible.
08:30.617 --> 08:31.137
[SPEAKER_01]: gender.
08:31.837 --> 08:34.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed race girls and boys are racialized differently.
08:35.419 --> 08:42.501
[SPEAKER_01]: They're sexualized differently, police differently, given different roles inside their families and communities.
08:43.121 --> 08:46.182
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't peel gender away from race.
08:49.753 --> 08:57.078
[SPEAKER_01]: Scholars like Maria PP root and others have recognized these variables that impact identity of mixed race people.
08:57.819 --> 08:59.240
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's where it gets interesting.
08:59.760 --> 09:08.066
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we're not just talking about race, we are focused on kids and people who are mixed race and mixed faith.
09:08.827 --> 09:11.969
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's talk about these variables in relation to religion.
09:12.689 --> 09:15.652
[SPEAKER_01]: Swap phenotype for visible religious markers.
09:16.532 --> 09:24.599
[SPEAKER_01]: a name like Aisha or Priya, Akipa, a mungle sutra, a bindi, or maybe even a vegetarian lunchbox.
09:25.520 --> 09:29.524
[SPEAKER_01]: Those function for religion, the way skin tone functions for race.
09:30.525 --> 09:37.071
[SPEAKER_01]: They're how others read you, and like phenotype, they don't always match how you identify.
09:40.415 --> 09:45.718
[SPEAKER_01]: family, and religiously mixed families, which parent is the carrier of tradition.
09:46.358 --> 09:50.140
[SPEAKER_01]: Religious labor is unevenly distributed many of times.
09:51.120 --> 09:53.181
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone has to remember when the valley falls.
09:53.882 --> 09:56.823
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone has to call grandma about the Pooja date.
09:57.944 --> 10:04.527
[SPEAKER_01]: That parent's tradition usually wins, not because anyone decided, but because someone has to keep the calendar.
10:06.447 --> 10:08.428
[SPEAKER_01]: community becomes infrastructure.
10:08.928 --> 10:16.973
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a synagogue that will accept the child of a sick mother and a Jewish father, a mosque that will welcome an interfaith family?
10:17.653 --> 10:25.377
[SPEAKER_01]: A Hindu temple whose priest will perform a Somskara for a child whose father isn't Hindu, communities don't just exist.
10:25.997 --> 10:28.759
[SPEAKER_01]: They extend or withhold belonging.
10:30.271 --> 10:34.372
[SPEAKER_01]: Generation actually works even better for religion than for race.
10:34.812 --> 10:35.692
[SPEAKER_01]: We can trace it.
10:36.493 --> 10:41.254
[SPEAKER_01]: Across immigrant groups, first generation religious observance tends to be high.
10:41.954 --> 10:46.475
[SPEAKER_01]: The second generation often moves towards lower observance.
10:47.216 --> 10:50.917
[SPEAKER_01]: Many will describe themselves as, quote, spiritual but not religious.
10:52.197 --> 10:55.818
[SPEAKER_01]: The third generation sometimes reclaims sometimes doesn't.
10:56.734 --> 11:09.139
[SPEAKER_01]: A second-generation Hindu mother, married to a fourth-generation Catholic father, is passing on two very differently shaped traditions, even if both call themselves religious.
11:10.459 --> 11:11.960
[SPEAKER_01]: Geography is decisive.
11:12.420 --> 11:17.342
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bible Belt teaches a Hindu Christian child something different than the Bay Area does.
11:18.042 --> 11:25.465
[SPEAKER_01]: The proximity of a giant temple, a Korean church, a queer affirming mosque, these aren't background
11:26.640 --> 11:33.564
[SPEAKER_01]: They decide which parts of a child's religious heritage become real and which stay abstract.
11:34.604 --> 11:37.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Gender here gets even more pointed.
11:37.726 --> 11:43.189
[SPEAKER_01]: Relations assign roles to bodies in ways racial communities mostly don't.
11:43.909 --> 11:44.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Who covers her head?
11:45.450 --> 11:46.971
[SPEAKER_01]: Who resides cottage?
11:47.471 --> 11:48.612
[SPEAKER_01]: Who lights the deer?
11:49.272 --> 11:52.254
[SPEAKER_01]: A mixed religious daughter and son in the same household.
11:52.742 --> 11:59.340
[SPEAKER_01]: can end up with different religious identities, not because of belief, but because of what each experienced.
12:02.003 --> 12:04.524
[SPEAKER_00]: So back to the question, what are you really?
12:05.284 --> 12:08.765
[SPEAKER_01]: The honest answer is, it depends on where you're standing.
12:09.425 --> 12:12.426
[SPEAKER_01]: It depends on the grandparent within driving distance.
12:12.947 --> 12:23.550
[SPEAKER_01]: The temple within 40 minutes, the holiday on the school calendar, the language at dinner, the name on the birth certificate, the food in the lunch box.
12:24.795 --> 12:27.536
[SPEAKER_01]: These aren't the wallpaper around a child's identity.
12:27.876 --> 12:29.116
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the architecture.
12:29.877 --> 12:34.618
[SPEAKER_01]: But even when the architecture is built, you still have to walk through the doors.
12:35.358 --> 12:45.241
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time a mixed person walks into a room, a classroom, a temple, a Thanksgiving dinner with the other side of the family, something happens.
12:45.881 --> 12:47.122
[SPEAKER_01]: They're crossing a border.
12:48.207 --> 13:08.087
[SPEAKER_01]: Maria PP route an international authority on mixed heritage identity credited with publishing the first contemporary work on mixed race people argues that by racial and multiracial people are constantly crossing borders, not geographical ones, social, racial, religious ones.
13:09.008 --> 13:13.274
[SPEAKER_01]: Every new room is a fast, unspoken negotiation.
13:14.015 --> 13:15.558
[SPEAKER_01]: How will people read me here?
13:16.178 --> 13:18.502
[SPEAKER_01]: Which parts of me get seen?
13:19.303 --> 13:21.346
[SPEAKER_01]: Which parts get erased?
13:23.344 --> 13:30.626
[SPEAKER_01]: What's so durable about roots work is that she refused to flatten any of that into a single right answer.
13:31.586 --> 13:40.108
[SPEAKER_01]: She's insisted there's a real range of ways mixed people navigate those crossings and that all of them all of them can be healthy.
13:41.389 --> 13:50.071
[SPEAKER_01]: She's identified for and once you can name them you can start recognizing what a child might be doing in any given moment
14:03.602 --> 14:07.565
[SPEAKER_01]: The first weeks of college or strange, everybody arrives caring too much.
14:08.145 --> 14:12.669
[SPEAKER_01]: Too many bags, too many expectations, too many versions of themselves.
14:13.089 --> 14:14.910
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a suitcase that's too heavy.
14:15.291 --> 14:18.833
[SPEAKER_01]: A room that's too small, a dining hall that feels like a maze.
14:19.994 --> 14:21.295
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are introductions.
14:21.855 --> 14:23.416
[SPEAKER_01]: So many introductions.
14:23.836 --> 14:24.536
[SPEAKER_01]: What's your name?
14:24.976 --> 14:25.877
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you studying?
14:26.297 --> 14:27.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are you from?
14:27.898 --> 14:29.819
[SPEAKER_01]: That last question seems simple.
14:30.259 --> 14:31.359
[SPEAKER_01]: It almost never is.
14:32.060 --> 14:36.021
[SPEAKER_01]: For some students, college becomes an opportunity for reinvention.
14:36.481 --> 14:38.823
[SPEAKER_01]: For others, it presents a different challenge.
14:39.203 --> 14:40.323
[SPEAKER_01]: Not reinvention.
14:40.903 --> 14:41.824
[SPEAKER_01]: Translation.
14:42.920 --> 14:47.742
[SPEAKER_01]: The constant work of explaining who they are before anyone will let them belong.
14:48.802 --> 14:51.243
[SPEAKER_01]: Kita are chose to live on the Swan of Floor.
14:51.823 --> 14:56.744
[SPEAKER_01]: Swan of stands for South and Southwest Asian and North African.
14:57.185 --> 14:58.425
[SPEAKER_01]: It's affinity housing.
14:59.930 --> 15:08.513
[SPEAKER_01]: Community built around shared culture, shared histories, and a shared understanding of what it feels like to constantly explain yourself.
15:09.333 --> 15:13.394
[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine arriving on campus and walking down the hallway.
15:14.574 --> 15:16.615
[SPEAKER_01]: You hear music drifting from a room.
15:16.835 --> 15:26.478
[SPEAKER_01]: You recognize foods, languages, names, references, things that require no explanation, things that are simply understood.
15:27.158 --> 15:37.344
[SPEAKER_01]: And that matters more than people realize, because mixed race and mixed faith kids spend enormous amounts of energy translating themselves.
15:38.185 --> 15:41.306
[SPEAKER_01]: Every conversation involves calculations.
15:42.167 --> 15:44.708
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do I explain to I mentioned my religion?
15:44.928 --> 15:46.209
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I explain my family?
15:46.449 --> 15:47.750
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I correct that assumption?
15:47.850 --> 15:50.392
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I tell the whole story or just enough?
15:51.612 --> 15:54.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes those calculations are conscious,
15:56.678 --> 15:59.060
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're almost always happening.
15:59.860 --> 16:08.946
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a whispered conversation happening in the back of their head, a constant processing task running underneath everything else.
16:10.007 --> 16:13.249
[SPEAKER_01]: The swan of floor did something remarkable for Kavar.
16:14.029 --> 16:15.350
[SPEAKER_01]: It lowered the volume.
16:16.051 --> 16:19.273
[SPEAKER_01]: It reduced what I call the explanation text.
16:19.593 --> 16:21.514
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I moved out to Berkeley for college,
16:26.063 --> 16:33.631
[SPEAKER_02]: to Berkeley, you feel like the housing application, and you talk about what dorm you want to live in, and what kind of room you want to live in, and what kind of habits you want your roommates to have, and everything.
16:34.632 --> 16:38.196
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are residential theme programs at Berkeley.
16:38.487 --> 16:45.310
[SPEAKER_01]: This is my son, Kiddharwala's Bartlett, talking about his decision to live on the Swana floor at Berkeley.
16:45.590 --> 16:50.572
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of them are about interest, there's one for people who are particularly environmentally conscious.
16:51.292 --> 16:53.153
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of them are about various forms of identity.
16:53.193 --> 16:58.895
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a there's a there's a queer identity house and stuff like that, but most of them are ethnic slash racial.
16:59.455 --> 17:10.583
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a program for Black students to live together, there's a program for Hispanic students to live together, and I joined the Swanna program, SSWA and A stands for South Asian, Southwest Asian and North African.
17:11.504 --> 17:16.448
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, locally, locally, you could say all the basic kids in the Arab kids plus like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria.
17:17.308 --> 17:27.216
[SPEAKER_02]: And I decided to live there because I grew up understanding the value of Indian community, even though I never felt particularly accepted by a lot of the Indian community in New Jersey.
17:27.857 --> 17:38.694
[SPEAKER_01]: For Kiddar, a white presenting mixed Indian kid, living with other South Asian and North African students was life-changing.
17:39.483 --> 17:41.704
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining this program was usually one of the best decisions of my life.
17:42.225 --> 17:44.286
[SPEAKER_02]: There were 20 of us, crammed into a dorm hallway.
17:44.786 --> 17:53.692
[SPEAKER_02]: We went through all the trials and tribulations that you do when you're moving into dorms and figuring out just sharing bathrooms and, you know, ghastly roommates and everything.
17:54.412 --> 17:57.034
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, we went to local cultural events together.
17:57.414 --> 18:00.176
[SPEAKER_02]: When the Rathory rolled around in October, we all went to Garb but together.
18:00.196 --> 18:03.398
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was really great for me as a mixed kid who'd always kind of been,
18:04.462 --> 18:10.395
[SPEAKER_02]: And at best, like, God weird there is at worst, like flat-out rejected from a lot of Indian and Hindu cultural events.
18:12.184 --> 18:17.749
[SPEAKER_02]: to have to go with like a buffer of people who look like they belong and also love me very much.
18:18.530 --> 18:23.495
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would realize that it makes it a lot easier to just not really care about what anybody else thinks.
18:24.536 --> 18:26.698
[SPEAKER_02]: And have a really, really great time enjoying my own culture.
18:27.438 --> 18:29.040
[SPEAKER_02]: We went to the volleyball celebrations together.
18:29.100 --> 18:33.284
[SPEAKER_02]: I celebrated holy for the first time with these people in my first spring semester.
18:34.845 --> 18:36.866
[SPEAKER_02]: We would, and it was really, really great.
18:36.886 --> 18:57.777
[SPEAKER_02]: The program was majority Indian, but we also had classmates from of Bengali heritage, afghanas, well, and we would do our best to go out to their cultural events as well and learn a lot, and that inspired me to eventually join an advocacy organization on campus that catered to a lot of the same communities.
18:58.411 --> 19:11.647
[SPEAKER_01]: Having lived on the Swan of Floor gave him a community so that when Kiddar showed up at social and cultural events on campus, he didn't need to begin every interaction with a ten-minute orientation session to who he was.
19:12.549 --> 19:15.431
[SPEAKER_01]: He could simply be, and that is crucial.
19:15.771 --> 19:21.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we often talk about colleges a place where young people discover themselves, and that's true.
19:21.894 --> 19:24.316
[SPEAKER_01]: But discovery doesn't happen in isolation.
19:24.956 --> 19:26.377
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens in community.
19:27.057 --> 19:31.040
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens when people see parts of themselves reflected back.
19:31.920 --> 19:50.049
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens when young adults encounter spaces, where they don't have to spend all their energy defending their existence, and that brings me back to Dr. Maria P. P. Root.
19:50.930 --> 19:54.191
[SPEAKER_01]: Maria Root has spent decades studying multiracial identity.
19:55.512 --> 19:58.174
[SPEAKER_01]: What she discovered was surprisingly simple.
20:01.801 --> 20:03.541
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't one destination.
20:03.761 --> 20:05.362
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't one correct answer.
20:06.462 --> 20:10.463
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, there are many ways people learn to live with complexity.
20:11.163 --> 20:15.004
[SPEAKER_01]: Many ways people navigate the borderlands between communities.
20:15.944 --> 20:23.306
[SPEAKER_01]: Root identified common categories mixed people develop to exist in the world authentically.
20:24.026 --> 20:27.467
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people place both feet firmly in both communities.
20:32.608 --> 20:39.712
[SPEAKER_01]: Some find their home on the border itself, among others who understand what it means to live between worlds.
20:41.153 --> 20:48.816
[SPEAKER_01]: And some establish a home base while continuing to make forays outward into other communities that shape them.
20:50.177 --> 20:53.799
[SPEAKER_01]: The important thing is, these are not boxes.
20:54.439 --> 20:55.980
[SPEAKER_01]: They are possibilities.
21:01.379 --> 21:02.621
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's start with the first.
21:08.469 --> 21:10.752
[SPEAKER_01]: Both feet in both communities.
21:11.940 --> 21:16.501
[SPEAKER_01]: When Githar was growing up, that was the world we intentionally created.
21:17.162 --> 21:19.883
[SPEAKER_01]: There were Hindu traditions, there were Christian traditions.
21:20.243 --> 21:26.225
[SPEAKER_01]: Temple, church, divali, Christmas, different prayers, different stories.
21:27.225 --> 21:29.366
[SPEAKER_01]: Different ways of understanding the world.
21:30.146 --> 21:33.487
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal was never to make him choose.
21:34.767 --> 21:36.848
[SPEAKER_03]: I am both Christian and Hindu.
21:36.908 --> 21:49.692
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't say I've done a huge amount of practice in either one in college, but I am, you know, I'm confirmed in the Episcopalian church and I had my genoid in it at the Monday or in Atlanta, which is of course like the coming of AIDS ceremony reflection on the Hindu side.
21:50.592 --> 21:57.574
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Kather again, talking about having his life rooted in both his white Christian and
22:00.165 --> 22:03.506
[SPEAKER_03]: I grew up every week going to church every Sunday in New Jersey.
22:03.526 --> 22:11.230
[SPEAKER_03]: I had a very, very welcoming congregation who was super chill with the fact that, for example, my mom is not baptized.
22:11.970 --> 22:13.911
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom did never want to convert Christianity.
22:14.431 --> 22:18.372
[SPEAKER_03]: My grandparents come to church when they come visit New Jersey.
22:18.512 --> 22:19.213
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody loves them.
22:19.693 --> 22:23.334
[SPEAKER_03]: I would talk about Hindu gods in church school and everybody was super interested.
22:23.775 --> 22:26.396
[SPEAKER_03]: So really, really great community to be a part of,
22:27.894 --> 22:36.697
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so grateful I had that upbringing in the Christian faith because like you see just all of Christianity on the news right now and I just love being able to call it total BS.
22:37.677 --> 22:47.580
[SPEAKER_03]: In Hershey, I mean the community at large was definitely the more conservative Christian side which is why I don't think I ever really connected with that place religiously.
22:48.320 --> 22:53.981
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, my mom couldn't take community and so I think for a little while I wouldn't take community because I was like, that's not cool.
22:56.082 --> 23:01.625
[SPEAKER_03]: They're all just like it's very, it's small town America, which like I said because I experienced it during summer time and football season.
23:01.665 --> 23:03.645
[SPEAKER_03]: I love in terms of my family.
23:04.366 --> 23:06.547
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time I was born, my grandmother had passed.
23:07.027 --> 23:10.349
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was just my grandpa out there and he is was awesome.
23:11.149 --> 23:12.469
[SPEAKER_03]: One of one of my favorite people ever.
23:13.590 --> 23:24.135
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, the fact that I was mixed, it was, I don't know that I, like, left it at the door necessarily when I went to Hershey, but it just never really came
23:25.090 --> 23:28.953
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I mean, my grandpa was never anything but loving and supportive.
23:29.073 --> 23:32.616
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think that Hershey is very much my like white American side.
23:33.416 --> 23:37.179
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was not much of an experience there at all.
23:38.180 --> 23:41.843
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal was to help him inherit all of it.
23:42.863 --> 23:48.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Not half of one thing and half of another, all of it.
23:49.411 --> 23:50.292
[SPEAKER_03]: because I've been saying the same.
23:51.052 --> 23:53.934
[SPEAKER_03]: That she's, I don't even think that was good, which is that I'm Indian and white.
23:54.274 --> 23:56.655
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Christian Hindu, I'm not like half of this or half of that.
23:57.356 --> 23:59.157
[SPEAKER_03]: And like I belong here just as much as you do.
24:00.158 --> 24:02.179
[SPEAKER_03]: But of course what I was saying was the same.
24:02.199 --> 24:04.880
[SPEAKER_03]: Like my name is Gator part lit, I'm Indian and white and I'm Christian and Hindu.
24:05.821 --> 24:06.722
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not one of the other.
24:07.382 --> 24:17.128
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I think, you know, kind of like later in high school and into college, I kind of just had had enough of those experiences where if I,
24:18.324 --> 24:20.045
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm in a space and I feel like I'm not welcome.
24:20.145 --> 24:29.428
[SPEAKER_03]: I just either, like if they're in grief, I have to stay at a stay and I just don't really care what anyone who does with me thinks or I just leave.
24:30.108 --> 24:38.571
[SPEAKER_03]: Because there are there are places that no one except me and I feel like the the kind of people who like really take your shoe with my identity.
24:39.531 --> 24:43.693
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's not my job to fix and they're not really people I want to be around in the meantime.
24:44.571 --> 24:49.253
[SPEAKER_01]: Another way that people can be mixed is home on the border.
24:51.334 --> 24:56.396
[SPEAKER_01]: Not everyone experiences mixed identity that way all the time or at all.
24:57.632 --> 25:00.433
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes experience has changed over time.
25:01.233 --> 25:05.134
[SPEAKER_01]: For some people, home isn't found in either community.
25:05.835 --> 25:11.777
[SPEAKER_01]: It's found among other people who understand what it means to move between worlds.
25:12.697 --> 25:16.778
[SPEAKER_01]: In high school, Kither was around other mixed kids all the time.
25:17.518 --> 25:21.680
[SPEAKER_01]: Within our family, he shared this experience with his cousins.
25:22.770 --> 25:32.161
[SPEAKER_01]: Being around other mixed people helped him see a universal experience of those who are balancing two or more cultures, religions, or ethnicities.
25:33.322 --> 25:35.805
[SPEAKER_01]: This is how Kather himself explains it.
25:36.853 --> 25:39.094
[SPEAKER_03]: as an Indian and white mixed kid.
25:39.194 --> 25:41.215
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's always nice to be around other Indian white mixed kids.
25:41.275 --> 25:42.055
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot of my cousins.
25:42.115 --> 25:44.556
[SPEAKER_03]: It's part of the reason why I love our extended family so much.
25:45.277 --> 25:49.979
[SPEAKER_03]: But like mixed kids don't need to be around there specific mix to feel like they belong.
25:50.019 --> 25:52.920
[SPEAKER_03]: Mix kids need to be around other mixed kids to feel like they belong.
25:53.240 --> 25:58.923
[SPEAKER_03]: Being mixed, race, culture, religion, absolutely anything like having multiple identities coming out.
25:58.943 --> 26:00.223
[SPEAKER_03]: You're from multiple sides to your family.
26:00.243 --> 26:01.284
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes having to connect them.
26:01.304 --> 26:04.045
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes having to run interference and code switch between them.
26:04.460 --> 26:09.304
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a universal experience, no matter what your combination of.
26:10.044 --> 26:20.972
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, I had friends who were Indian and black, Indian and black, Bengali and black, Colombian and Dominican, or any mix of anything.
26:20.992 --> 26:26.156
[SPEAKER_03]: Christian and Jewish, and it is just a shared experience, no matter what.
26:26.706 --> 26:31.508
[SPEAKER_01]: What Kather is describing is what Ruth called finding a home on the border.
26:32.288 --> 26:37.851
[SPEAKER_01]: A community where details may differ but the experience feels familiar.
26:38.991 --> 26:41.913
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where people understand code switching.
26:42.873 --> 26:46.917
[SPEAKER_01]: Some mixed people decisively claim the border as home.
26:47.758 --> 27:00.269
[SPEAKER_01]: They identify most strongly, not with either parents' community, but with the experience of being mixed, with what the Chicana scholar Gloria and Zaldua calls mestiza consciousness.
27:01.450 --> 27:05.894
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the people who say, I am neither one thing nor the other.
27:33.483 --> 27:35.664
[SPEAKER_01]: this isn't in authenticity.
27:36.304 --> 27:37.384
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not betrayal.
27:38.045 --> 27:39.245
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not pretending.
27:40.405 --> 27:46.007
[SPEAKER_01]: It's recognizing that different parts of ourselves become more visible in different places.
27:46.988 --> 27:58.412
[SPEAKER_01]: When I asked Gither about spending time in Hershey, Pennsylvania, John's hometown, and Atlanta, Georgia, my hometown, he described exactly that experience.
28:00.705 --> 28:06.808
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a period of time where I liked going to Hershey more than Atlanta, but that was mostly because I had cousins in Atlanta that I thought were really annoying.
28:07.888 --> 28:08.549
[SPEAKER_03]: Now I love them.
28:08.589 --> 28:15.612
[SPEAKER_03]: I love being a big brother, but it was just an adjustment when you're an only child, and then suddenly in the summertime, you have three younger siblings following you around my ducklings.
28:16.532 --> 28:17.352
[SPEAKER_03]: I love them so much.
28:18.833 --> 28:21.534
[SPEAKER_03]: And so for a little while, I liked being like the center of attention in Hershey.
28:22.195 --> 28:22.595
[SPEAKER_03]: I think...
28:24.199 --> 28:34.642
[SPEAKER_03]: Like place aside, I definitely like because I'm white passing, I compensate by like trying to know more and participate more in Indian and Hindu things.
28:35.562 --> 28:41.424
[SPEAKER_03]: I never, you know, like I never feel like I have to prove anything by going to church or like eating a sandwich.
28:42.604 --> 28:50.147
[SPEAKER_03]: And I love, and that's also partially, it's difficult because I love my church community, the one that I grew up in, but I don't really love a lot of other ones.
28:52.658 --> 29:00.142
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I guess I don't really know where I'm going there, but no, I think that, yeah, I think that Hershey and Atlanta are just places where I take different parts of myself.
29:00.423 --> 29:09.908
[SPEAKER_01]: He's describing how the individual can move fluidly between communities, bringing different parts of themselves to the foreground, depending on where they are.
29:10.749 --> 29:14.511
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, a mixed-reased child with a black grandmother.
29:15.491 --> 29:18.153
[SPEAKER_01]: When at Grandma's House, blackness is front and center.
29:19.718 --> 29:23.140
[SPEAKER_01]: at a predominantly wide school, the presentation may be different.
29:24.241 --> 29:30.744
[SPEAKER_01]: Root was careful to say that this is not switching loyalties, and it is not in authenticity.
29:31.545 --> 29:37.508
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a sophisticated social skill, the ability to read a room and respond to its cues.
29:39.300 --> 29:49.883
[SPEAKER_01]: The danger comes when a child starts to feel that shifting is not a choice, but a survival mechanism, and it's something they don't like, but they have to do it to fit in.
29:51.924 --> 29:57.386
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is, for mixed people, no single space ever holds all of who they are.
29:58.026 --> 30:03.488
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not confusion, that's adaptation, that's growth, that's being human.
30:13.584 --> 30:19.988
[SPEAKER_01]: The fourth pathway, route described, is creating a home base and making for raise outward.
30:20.949 --> 30:25.751
[SPEAKER_01]: This is when an individual establish a primary racial culture or religious home base.
30:26.572 --> 30:32.535
[SPEAKER_01]: Place that meets their psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual needs over an extended period of time.
30:33.636 --> 30:36.918
[SPEAKER_01]: From that grounded place, they venture into other communities.
30:37.418 --> 30:39.779
[SPEAKER_01]: but they always have somewhere to return to.
30:40.480 --> 30:44.922
[SPEAKER_01]: Crucially, root understood that this is not a permanent arrangement.
30:45.582 --> 30:48.544
[SPEAKER_01]: People can change how they identify over a lifetime.
30:48.824 --> 30:53.627
[SPEAKER_01]: A home base at 20 does not mean the same home base at 40.
30:54.567 --> 31:02.552
[SPEAKER_01]: What makes this fourth way important to understand is that it can look from the outside, like someone has simply chosen a side.
31:03.651 --> 31:09.355
[SPEAKER_01]: And that misreading by family members by teachers, by peers, can cause real harm.
31:10.236 --> 31:20.604
[SPEAKER_01]: When someone has found a home base that gives them stability and belonging, the last thing they need is to be accused of betraying or abandoning the other parts of themselves.
31:21.424 --> 31:22.185
[SPEAKER_01]: They have not.
31:22.765 --> 31:26.348
[SPEAKER_01]: They are standing somewhere solid enough to keep their footing.
31:29.002 --> 31:31.825
[SPEAKER_02]: There's definitely a lot of hypothetical directions that go in.
31:32.545 --> 31:50.924
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a facet of that that concerns me that I think a lot of diasporic is can relate to regardless of whether or not you're mixed race is that like when you know as generations go on in the United States culture as hard as we may try does get diluted a little bit I grew up in like rich and vibrant Indian culture and
31:52.393 --> 32:02.176
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, God forbid when my grandparents or my parents are not around, I am not, I don't know how confident I am in my ability to pass that culture on solely, you know?
32:02.236 --> 32:12.779
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, that culture doesn't just come from a single parent, it comes from, you know, like on the Indian side, for example, it comes from going to some auntie's house to do my homework after school.
32:13.400 --> 32:17.321
[SPEAKER_02]: It comes from talking to other Indian kids, I don't know, like I, I
32:19.592 --> 32:45.839
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still coming to understand and I have a lot more conversations to have with my parents about just how intentionally they structured by upbringing because for example, I mean, I didn't go to church, I didn't go to church while I was in college once I left home, but I definitely carried the lessons that learning about the Bible as well as the practical lessons that my very loving and progressive church community gave me throughout the first 18 years of my life and I
32:48.192 --> 33:03.347
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't eat Indian food every single day, you know, once left to my own devices, I'll catch college, I love cooking Indian food, but the way that my grandmother cooks fresh, fresh food for lunch and dinner every day is just not always something that is me crazy practical to do when you're 20 and you have five mentors next week.
33:05.852 --> 33:21.649
[SPEAKER_02]: So I have, I have been gifted such rich vibrant culture from both sides and how to continue it is definitely something that I am still grappling with when I think like I said that that any diasporic kid can relate to that.
33:22.270 --> 33:26.014
[SPEAKER_02]: I think all I can aim to do kind of in this like very
33:27.255 --> 33:47.303
[SPEAKER_02]: very formative next decade of my life is, you know, remember, remember the best of both sides find, try to find ways to cultivate both sides of my identity and experiences involving both sides of my identity as best I can, I think it's really easy to
33:48.323 --> 34:10.767
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, to, you know, blink and suddenly it's been five years and you haven't done this, like this cultural thing that you always used to do as a kid or you haven't seen this family member in a really long time and I think really the best I can do for myself in any situation and I mean for, you know, any future family that I may have is just to stay intentional about keeping in touch and figuring out how to practically engage with with every side of my culture.
34:17.535 --> 34:22.260
[SPEAKER_01]: People change, communities change, life changes.
34:23.501 --> 34:29.808
[SPEAKER_01]: A person may spend years rooted in one identity and later discover another part of themselves calling for attention.
34:30.489 --> 34:38.077
[SPEAKER_01]: That may happen because they've changed places or had someone important come into their life that brings out a particular part of them.
34:39.018 --> 34:45.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it can just be because the way they think about themselves has changed as they move through the stages of life.
34:46.040 --> 34:47.441
[SPEAKER_01]: The point isn't arriving.
34:48.021 --> 34:50.041
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is remaining open to growth.
34:50.922 --> 34:58.264
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where I find myself as a parent, because one of the hardest lessons of parenting is accepting possibility.
34:59.124 --> 35:01.285
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't control who my child becomes.
35:02.220 --> 35:22.593
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't control where he'll live, who he'll love, what communities will become important to him, what traditions he'll carry forward, or which ones he'll set aside, and maybe that's exactly how it should be, because identity isn't something we hand our children fully formed.
35:23.213 --> 35:30.198
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something they build, one relationship, one community, one experience at a time.
35:41.343 --> 35:46.198
[SPEAKER_01]: 24 hours after we recorded this conversation, K. There are boarded a plane for Thailand.
35:47.137 --> 35:49.618
[SPEAKER_01]: And if Maria rude taught us anything, it's this.
35:50.179 --> 35:51.719
[SPEAKER_01]: Identity isn't static.
35:52.219 --> 35:53.880
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a destination.
35:54.140 --> 35:55.641
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a final answer.
35:56.061 --> 35:56.922
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a process.
35:57.622 --> 35:59.363
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of relationships.
35:59.703 --> 36:01.384
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of communities.
36:01.564 --> 36:03.425
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of discoveries.
36:04.585 --> 36:11.689
[SPEAKER_01]: As parents, teachers, mentors and friends, our job is not to decide who young people will become.
36:12.801 --> 36:16.863
[SPEAKER_01]: Our job is to create spaces where they can discover that for themselves.
36:17.743 --> 36:23.305
[SPEAKER_01]: Spaces that reduce the explanation tax, Spaces that make belonging possible.
36:24.246 --> 36:30.849
[SPEAKER_01]: Spaces that say you don't need permission, you don't need to prove yourself before you can participate.
36:31.469 --> 36:33.450
[SPEAKER_01]: You already belong.
36:34.850 --> 36:42.817
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if our goal is to raise healthy mixed race and mixed faith children, that's ultimately what we're trying to give them.
36:44.318 --> 36:59.170
[SPEAKER_01]: Not certainty, not a final identity, but something much more important, a place to stand, a place from which they can explore, a place from which they can grow.
37:00.669 --> 37:10.518
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where they don't have to explain themselves before they can become themselves, and every child deserves that.
37:23.562 --> 37:27.584
[SPEAKER_01]: Three decades ago, I fell in love with a man in the most unlikely place.
37:28.564 --> 37:37.669
[SPEAKER_01]: A woman from Atlanta, whose family immigrated from India, fell in love with a wider piscabalian from Pennsylvania in Jerusalem of all places.
37:38.349 --> 37:50.315
[SPEAKER_01]: That story took us back home where we navigated complex path to getting married and integrating our families and making our traditions, rituals, religions, and lives work together.
37:51.342 --> 37:57.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Two decades ago, Kather appeared in the world and I asked the question, can he be both?
37:58.666 --> 38:11.012
[SPEAKER_01]: Can we raise him in a way that his mixed life and identity will manifest itself in the world that honors every aspect of his parents and their heritages?
38:12.232 --> 38:26.465
[SPEAKER_01]: As he's grown and gone out into the world as an independent young man, I've seen him navigate how to be a mixed kid, both Hindu and Christian, both white and Indian, in New Jersey, in Atlanta, and in Berkeley.
38:27.005 --> 38:37.254
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, as I speak today, he's on a plane for Thailand to work at a university for displaced Burmese students who have very few resources and places for education.
38:38.095 --> 38:42.497
[SPEAKER_01]: He'll be gone a year and I don't know who he'll become when he comes home.
38:42.877 --> 38:46.558
[SPEAKER_01]: What I do know is that it is possible to be both.
38:47.098 --> 38:48.879
[SPEAKER_01]: It is possible to be rooted.
38:49.599 --> 38:55.181
[SPEAKER_01]: It is possible to carry on languages and the love of every aspect of who you are.
38:56.021 --> 38:59.643
[SPEAKER_01]: My hope is not that he comes back the same person.
39:00.383 --> 39:03.604
[SPEAKER_01]: The one that is a perfect clone of both me and John.
39:04.079 --> 39:19.963
[SPEAKER_01]: My hope is that he comes home more fully himself, living in every possibility of his existence with the intention and care to pass on every aspect of who he is to the person he loves and his family in the future.
39:33.351 --> 39:34.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening to Mixed.
39:35.232 --> 39:38.492
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the last episode, but it isn't the end of the story.
39:38.953 --> 39:41.293
[SPEAKER_01]: Please like, subscribe, and tell others.
39:41.893 --> 39:45.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Look in the show notes for the course pack, so you can assign this in your class.
39:46.535 --> 39:48.195
[SPEAKER_01]: And we chat via my website.
39:48.555 --> 39:58.498
[SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like me to speak to your academic, religious, or civic audience, I'm Dr. Kathy Joshee reminding you that you may have multiple identities, but you're always whole.
39:59.972 --> 40:09.696
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was created by me, Dr. Kathy Joshee, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and Access Mundi Media.
40:10.456 --> 40:17.359
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley O'Neshi, and the original music and engineering by Scott O'Kamoto.
40:18.039 --> 40:20.640
[SPEAKER_01]: Carry O'Neshi provided production assistance.
40:21.300 --> 40:23.301
[SPEAKER_01]: Our story editor is Leah Payne.
40:23.961 --> 40:33.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation and is made in collaboration with a party and the Under God's project.
00:00.031 --> 00:03.715
[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation.
00:03.875 --> 00:11.482
[SPEAKER_00]: In conjunction with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, Apari, and the Institute for Religion Media and Civic Engagement.
00:27.186 --> 00:29.187
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay there, can you come down here for a minute?
00:29.847 --> 00:34.208
[SPEAKER_01]: My son, my only child, was packing to leave for college, 3,000 miles away.
00:35.148 --> 00:37.709
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like my heart wasn't just outside my body.
00:38.229 --> 00:42.870
[SPEAKER_01]: It was packing two suitcases and a backpack and preparing to leave for California.
00:43.910 --> 00:48.491
[SPEAKER_01]: In the days before his departure, we were all trying to make sure he didn't forget anything.
00:49.392 --> 00:51.552
[SPEAKER_01]: And that he was ready to live away from home.
00:52.212 --> 00:54.733
[SPEAKER_01]: Clear across the country for the first time.
00:56.262 --> 01:03.006
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have much time, he said, as we sat down in the living room, I need to stop by school and then go see one of my teachers for the last time.
01:03.766 --> 01:09.810
[SPEAKER_01]: He's 18, a young adult, six feet tall, with long, wavy hair and a deep voice.
01:11.115 --> 01:17.637
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat down, ready for yet another conversation from me about how the world works and how it might see him.
01:18.297 --> 01:23.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Though he's used to it by now, he still listens with respect and patience.
01:23.718 --> 01:24.738
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this kid.
01:25.759 --> 01:29.720
[SPEAKER_01]: There are conversations you expect to have before your child leaves for college.
01:30.020 --> 01:39.742
[SPEAKER_01]: You talk about classes, you talk about money, you talk about laundry, broom mates, bad decisions, good decisions, and all the practical realities of becoming an adult.
01:41.830 --> 01:47.694
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there are the conversations you know you need to have, but aren't sure how they'll land.
01:48.775 --> 01:52.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Before kid or left for Berkeley, I had one of those conversations.
01:53.798 --> 02:01.764
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't about academics, it wasn't about time management, it wasn't about making friends, it was about his identities.
02:02.978 --> 02:06.645
[SPEAKER_01]: and what it might cause him to be open about them.
02:07.526 --> 02:12.275
[SPEAKER_01]: If you tell people your Hindu, some people may make assumptions about that.
02:13.485 --> 02:13.965
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what?
02:14.526 --> 02:18.990
[SPEAKER_01]: They may assume you support political movements you've never supported.
02:19.530 --> 02:23.814
[SPEAKER_01]: They may decide who you are before they know anything about you.
02:24.674 --> 02:29.178
[SPEAKER_01]: He said quietly, I could see him thinking, I continued.
02:30.039 --> 02:35.423
[SPEAKER_01]: If you tell people your Christian or that you go to church, people are going to make a different set of assumptions.
02:36.464 --> 02:56.697
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what he said, they may assume you're politically conservative, they may assume you oppose LGBTQ rights, they may assume you have certain views about abortion, gender, science, some people may hear the word Christian and immediately place you into a category that doesn't actually fit who you are.
02:57.658 --> 02:58.218
[SPEAKER_01]: He nodded.
02:59.679 --> 03:03.241
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth is some people will see Hindu and think they already know
03:06.762 --> 03:08.163
[SPEAKER_01]: and think they already know you.
03:09.184 --> 03:15.449
[SPEAKER_01]: In both cases, they're often responding to stereotypes, not to the person standing in front of them.
03:16.469 --> 03:17.030
[SPEAKER_01]: I paused.
03:19.031 --> 03:22.134
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not telling you this, so you'll hide who you are, I said.
03:23.114 --> 03:27.598
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm telling you because I want you to understand the landscape you're walking into.
03:28.626 --> 03:32.128
[SPEAKER_01]: Your job is to decide when and how you want to explain yourself.
03:32.668 --> 03:36.510
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes people will be curious, sometimes they'll make assumptions.
03:37.131 --> 03:38.551
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they'll get it wrong.
03:39.672 --> 03:43.854
[SPEAKER_01]: Because there's something that worries me when I think about young people and identity.
03:44.935 --> 03:47.456
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that they change, it's not that they grow.
03:47.797 --> 03:50.098
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not even that they leave traditions behind.
03:51.329 --> 04:03.534
[SPEAKER_01]: What worries me is when young people feel pressure to hide a part of themselves, not because they've examined it, and decided it no longer fits, but because somebody else has already decided what those identities mean.
04:05.035 --> 04:16.219
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we're serious about helping young people become fully themselves, then we have to create spaces where they can discover who they are before the world tells them who they're supposed to be.
04:16.879 --> 04:19.501
[SPEAKER_01]: That's especially true for mixed faith kids.
04:21.822 --> 04:31.909
[SPEAKER_01]: I want mixed kids to be able to show up in the world as mixed in ways that feel right to them, in which they feel whole and adjusted and authentically themselves.
04:32.849 --> 04:37.472
[SPEAKER_01]: I said to Kiddar, your identity isn't a debate for other people to win.
04:37.953 --> 04:45.438
[SPEAKER_01]: Your Hindu, your Christian, your Indian, your white, your all of those things at the same time.
04:46.187 --> 04:52.370
[SPEAKER_01]: The people worth knowing are the ones who are willing to listen long enough to understand the whole story.
05:29.852 --> 05:31.273
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Dr. Kathy Joshee.
05:31.633 --> 05:34.034
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a scholar of race, religion, and education.
05:34.395 --> 05:45.481
[SPEAKER_01]: A tenure professor who has spent two decades teaching about and studying how identity actually gets formed, not just in textbooks, but in kitchens, classrooms, and car rides home.
05:46.282 --> 05:56.988
[SPEAKER_01]: I've written six books, including White Christian Privilege, the illusion of religious equality in America, teaching for diversity in social justice, and Asian Americans in Dixie.
05:57.648 --> 06:01.111
[SPEAKER_01]: I've spoken to audiences from university lecture halls to the White House.
06:01.812 --> 06:04.995
[SPEAKER_01]: But this podcast isn't just research, it's personal.
06:05.635 --> 06:08.998
[SPEAKER_01]: It's where the scholarship and lived experience meet.
06:09.819 --> 06:10.900
[SPEAKER_01]: This is mixed.
06:27.207 --> 06:29.308
[SPEAKER_01]: Identity isn't a fixed thing you have.
06:29.668 --> 06:34.210
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something you build inside an environment, and that environment can change.
06:35.090 --> 06:43.073
[SPEAKER_01]: A mixed race kid at her grandmother's house is not the same self as the mixed race kid at her father's office party.
06:43.493 --> 06:44.694
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not confusion.
06:45.114 --> 06:47.275
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how identity actually works.
06:48.295 --> 06:52.337
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a list of variables that function as a web.
06:53.403 --> 07:02.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Family, community, geography, generation, gender, physical appearance, language, name, peer group.
07:04.221 --> 07:07.123
[SPEAKER_01]: The point isn't that anyone decides who you are.
07:07.363 --> 07:12.747
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is that identity emerges from how these variables interact.
07:13.748 --> 07:15.609
[SPEAKER_01]: A few are worth lingering on.
07:16.810 --> 07:29.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Fina type, what others see when they look at you, a mixed person who reads this white moves through the world differently than one who reads this black, no matter how they identify themselves.
07:30.300 --> 07:42.160
[SPEAKER_01]: Rays is partly assigned by what other people see, that shapes which identities feel available, which feel policed, which feel safe, and which feel like home.
07:43.431 --> 07:55.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Family was race talked about in the family, how was it talked about, which hereticis got named, which got downplayed, which grandparents lived in the house and which lived a continent away.
07:56.074 --> 08:06.257
[SPEAKER_01]: A biracial kid whose Korean grandmother helped race him grew up in a different ecology than a biracial kid whose Korean grandparents were a phone call across the ocean.
08:07.238 --> 08:07.979
[SPEAKER_01]: geography.
08:08.579 --> 08:12.764
[SPEAKER_01]: Being mixed in Hawaii is not the same as being mixed in Alabama.
08:13.244 --> 08:19.371
[SPEAKER_01]: Being mixed in 1985 was not the same as being mixed is in 2025.
08:20.272 --> 08:29.522
[SPEAKER_01]: Local history, who lives there, who holds power, who's been excluded, shapes, which mixed identities are even visible.
08:30.617 --> 08:31.137
[SPEAKER_01]: gender.
08:31.837 --> 08:34.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed race girls and boys are racialized differently.
08:35.419 --> 08:42.501
[SPEAKER_01]: They're sexualized differently, police differently, given different roles inside their families and communities.
08:43.121 --> 08:46.182
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't peel gender away from race.
08:49.753 --> 08:57.078
[SPEAKER_01]: Scholars like Maria PP root and others have recognized these variables that impact identity of mixed race people.
08:57.819 --> 08:59.240
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's where it gets interesting.
08:59.760 --> 09:08.066
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we're not just talking about race, we are focused on kids and people who are mixed race and mixed faith.
09:08.827 --> 09:11.969
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's talk about these variables in relation to religion.
09:12.689 --> 09:15.652
[SPEAKER_01]: Swap phenotype for visible religious markers.
09:16.532 --> 09:24.599
[SPEAKER_01]: a name like Aisha or Priya, Akipa, a mungle sutra, a bindi, or maybe even a vegetarian lunchbox.
09:25.520 --> 09:29.524
[SPEAKER_01]: Those function for religion, the way skin tone functions for race.
09:30.525 --> 09:37.071
[SPEAKER_01]: They're how others read you, and like phenotype, they don't always match how you identify.
09:40.415 --> 09:45.718
[SPEAKER_01]: family, and religiously mixed families, which parent is the carrier of tradition.
09:46.358 --> 09:50.140
[SPEAKER_01]: Religious labor is unevenly distributed many of times.
09:51.120 --> 09:53.181
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone has to remember when the valley falls.
09:53.882 --> 09:56.823
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone has to call grandma about the Pooja date.
09:57.944 --> 10:04.527
[SPEAKER_01]: That parent's tradition usually wins, not because anyone decided, but because someone has to keep the calendar.
10:06.447 --> 10:08.428
[SPEAKER_01]: community becomes infrastructure.
10:08.928 --> 10:16.973
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a synagogue that will accept the child of a sick mother and a Jewish father, a mosque that will welcome an interfaith family?
10:17.653 --> 10:25.377
[SPEAKER_01]: A Hindu temple whose priest will perform a Somskara for a child whose father isn't Hindu, communities don't just exist.
10:25.997 --> 10:28.759
[SPEAKER_01]: They extend or withhold belonging.
10:30.271 --> 10:34.372
[SPEAKER_01]: Generation actually works even better for religion than for race.
10:34.812 --> 10:35.692
[SPEAKER_01]: We can trace it.
10:36.493 --> 10:41.254
[SPEAKER_01]: Across immigrant groups, first generation religious observance tends to be high.
10:41.954 --> 10:46.475
[SPEAKER_01]: The second generation often moves towards lower observance.
10:47.216 --> 10:50.917
[SPEAKER_01]: Many will describe themselves as, quote, spiritual but not religious.
10:52.197 --> 10:55.818
[SPEAKER_01]: The third generation sometimes reclaims sometimes doesn't.
10:56.734 --> 11:09.139
[SPEAKER_01]: A second-generation Hindu mother, married to a fourth-generation Catholic father, is passing on two very differently shaped traditions, even if both call themselves religious.
11:10.459 --> 11:11.960
[SPEAKER_01]: Geography is decisive.
11:12.420 --> 11:17.342
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bible Belt teaches a Hindu Christian child something different than the Bay Area does.
11:18.042 --> 11:25.465
[SPEAKER_01]: The proximity of a giant temple, a Korean church, a queer affirming mosque, these aren't background
11:26.640 --> 11:33.564
[SPEAKER_01]: They decide which parts of a child's religious heritage become real and which stay abstract.
11:34.604 --> 11:37.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Gender here gets even more pointed.
11:37.726 --> 11:43.189
[SPEAKER_01]: Relations assign roles to bodies in ways racial communities mostly don't.
11:43.909 --> 11:44.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Who covers her head?
11:45.450 --> 11:46.971
[SPEAKER_01]: Who resides cottage?
11:47.471 --> 11:48.612
[SPEAKER_01]: Who lights the deer?
11:49.272 --> 11:52.254
[SPEAKER_01]: A mixed religious daughter and son in the same household.
11:52.742 --> 11:59.340
[SPEAKER_01]: can end up with different religious identities, not because of belief, but because of what each experienced.
12:02.003 --> 12:04.524
[SPEAKER_00]: So back to the question, what are you really?
12:05.284 --> 12:08.765
[SPEAKER_01]: The honest answer is, it depends on where you're standing.
12:09.425 --> 12:12.426
[SPEAKER_01]: It depends on the grandparent within driving distance.
12:12.947 --> 12:23.550
[SPEAKER_01]: The temple within 40 minutes, the holiday on the school calendar, the language at dinner, the name on the birth certificate, the food in the lunch box.
12:24.795 --> 12:27.536
[SPEAKER_01]: These aren't the wallpaper around a child's identity.
12:27.876 --> 12:29.116
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the architecture.
12:29.877 --> 12:34.618
[SPEAKER_01]: But even when the architecture is built, you still have to walk through the doors.
12:35.358 --> 12:45.241
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time a mixed person walks into a room, a classroom, a temple, a Thanksgiving dinner with the other side of the family, something happens.
12:45.881 --> 12:47.122
[SPEAKER_01]: They're crossing a border.
12:48.207 --> 13:08.087
[SPEAKER_01]: Maria PP route an international authority on mixed heritage identity credited with publishing the first contemporary work on mixed race people argues that by racial and multiracial people are constantly crossing borders, not geographical ones, social, racial, religious ones.
13:09.008 --> 13:13.274
[SPEAKER_01]: Every new room is a fast, unspoken negotiation.
13:14.015 --> 13:15.558
[SPEAKER_01]: How will people read me here?
13:16.178 --> 13:18.502
[SPEAKER_01]: Which parts of me get seen?
13:19.303 --> 13:21.346
[SPEAKER_01]: Which parts get erased?
13:23.344 --> 13:30.626
[SPEAKER_01]: What's so durable about roots work is that she refused to flatten any of that into a single right answer.
13:31.586 --> 13:40.108
[SPEAKER_01]: She's insisted there's a real range of ways mixed people navigate those crossings and that all of them all of them can be healthy.
13:41.389 --> 13:50.071
[SPEAKER_01]: She's identified for and once you can name them you can start recognizing what a child might be doing in any given moment
14:03.602 --> 14:07.565
[SPEAKER_01]: The first weeks of college or strange, everybody arrives caring too much.
14:08.145 --> 14:12.669
[SPEAKER_01]: Too many bags, too many expectations, too many versions of themselves.
14:13.089 --> 14:14.910
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a suitcase that's too heavy.
14:15.291 --> 14:18.833
[SPEAKER_01]: A room that's too small, a dining hall that feels like a maze.
14:19.994 --> 14:21.295
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are introductions.
14:21.855 --> 14:23.416
[SPEAKER_01]: So many introductions.
14:23.836 --> 14:24.536
[SPEAKER_01]: What's your name?
14:24.976 --> 14:25.877
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you studying?
14:26.297 --> 14:27.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are you from?
14:27.898 --> 14:29.819
[SPEAKER_01]: That last question seems simple.
14:30.259 --> 14:31.359
[SPEAKER_01]: It almost never is.
14:32.060 --> 14:36.021
[SPEAKER_01]: For some students, college becomes an opportunity for reinvention.
14:36.481 --> 14:38.823
[SPEAKER_01]: For others, it presents a different challenge.
14:39.203 --> 14:40.323
[SPEAKER_01]: Not reinvention.
14:40.903 --> 14:41.824
[SPEAKER_01]: Translation.
14:42.920 --> 14:47.742
[SPEAKER_01]: The constant work of explaining who they are before anyone will let them belong.
14:48.802 --> 14:51.243
[SPEAKER_01]: Kita are chose to live on the Swan of Floor.
14:51.823 --> 14:56.744
[SPEAKER_01]: Swan of stands for South and Southwest Asian and North African.
14:57.185 --> 14:58.425
[SPEAKER_01]: It's affinity housing.
14:59.930 --> 15:08.513
[SPEAKER_01]: Community built around shared culture, shared histories, and a shared understanding of what it feels like to constantly explain yourself.
15:09.333 --> 15:13.394
[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine arriving on campus and walking down the hallway.
15:14.574 --> 15:16.615
[SPEAKER_01]: You hear music drifting from a room.
15:16.835 --> 15:26.478
[SPEAKER_01]: You recognize foods, languages, names, references, things that require no explanation, things that are simply understood.
15:27.158 --> 15:37.344
[SPEAKER_01]: And that matters more than people realize, because mixed race and mixed faith kids spend enormous amounts of energy translating themselves.
15:38.185 --> 15:41.306
[SPEAKER_01]: Every conversation involves calculations.
15:42.167 --> 15:44.708
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do I explain to I mentioned my religion?
15:44.928 --> 15:46.209
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I explain my family?
15:46.449 --> 15:47.750
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I correct that assumption?
15:47.850 --> 15:50.392
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I tell the whole story or just enough?
15:51.612 --> 15:54.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes those calculations are conscious,
15:56.678 --> 15:59.060
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're almost always happening.
15:59.860 --> 16:08.946
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a whispered conversation happening in the back of their head, a constant processing task running underneath everything else.
16:10.007 --> 16:13.249
[SPEAKER_01]: The swan of floor did something remarkable for Kavar.
16:14.029 --> 16:15.350
[SPEAKER_01]: It lowered the volume.
16:16.051 --> 16:19.273
[SPEAKER_01]: It reduced what I call the explanation text.
16:19.593 --> 16:21.514
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I moved out to Berkeley for college,
16:26.063 --> 16:33.631
[SPEAKER_02]: to Berkeley, you feel like the housing application, and you talk about what dorm you want to live in, and what kind of room you want to live in, and what kind of habits you want your roommates to have, and everything.
16:34.632 --> 16:38.196
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are residential theme programs at Berkeley.
16:38.487 --> 16:45.310
[SPEAKER_01]: This is my son, Kiddharwala's Bartlett, talking about his decision to live on the Swana floor at Berkeley.
16:45.590 --> 16:50.572
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of them are about interest, there's one for people who are particularly environmentally conscious.
16:51.292 --> 16:53.153
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of them are about various forms of identity.
16:53.193 --> 16:58.895
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a there's a there's a queer identity house and stuff like that, but most of them are ethnic slash racial.
16:59.455 --> 17:10.583
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a program for Black students to live together, there's a program for Hispanic students to live together, and I joined the Swanna program, SSWA and A stands for South Asian, Southwest Asian and North African.
17:11.504 --> 17:16.448
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, locally, locally, you could say all the basic kids in the Arab kids plus like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria.
17:17.308 --> 17:27.216
[SPEAKER_02]: And I decided to live there because I grew up understanding the value of Indian community, even though I never felt particularly accepted by a lot of the Indian community in New Jersey.
17:27.857 --> 17:38.694
[SPEAKER_01]: For Kiddar, a white presenting mixed Indian kid, living with other South Asian and North African students was life-changing.
17:39.483 --> 17:41.704
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining this program was usually one of the best decisions of my life.
17:42.225 --> 17:44.286
[SPEAKER_02]: There were 20 of us, crammed into a dorm hallway.
17:44.786 --> 17:53.692
[SPEAKER_02]: We went through all the trials and tribulations that you do when you're moving into dorms and figuring out just sharing bathrooms and, you know, ghastly roommates and everything.
17:54.412 --> 17:57.034
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, we went to local cultural events together.
17:57.414 --> 18:00.176
[SPEAKER_02]: When the Rathory rolled around in October, we all went to Garb but together.
18:00.196 --> 18:03.398
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was really great for me as a mixed kid who'd always kind of been,
18:04.462 --> 18:10.395
[SPEAKER_02]: And at best, like, God weird there is at worst, like flat-out rejected from a lot of Indian and Hindu cultural events.
18:12.184 --> 18:17.749
[SPEAKER_02]: to have to go with like a buffer of people who look like they belong and also love me very much.
18:18.530 --> 18:23.495
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would realize that it makes it a lot easier to just not really care about what anybody else thinks.
18:24.536 --> 18:26.698
[SPEAKER_02]: And have a really, really great time enjoying my own culture.
18:27.438 --> 18:29.040
[SPEAKER_02]: We went to the volleyball celebrations together.
18:29.100 --> 18:33.284
[SPEAKER_02]: I celebrated holy for the first time with these people in my first spring semester.
18:34.845 --> 18:36.866
[SPEAKER_02]: We would, and it was really, really great.
18:36.886 --> 18:57.777
[SPEAKER_02]: The program was majority Indian, but we also had classmates from of Bengali heritage, afghanas, well, and we would do our best to go out to their cultural events as well and learn a lot, and that inspired me to eventually join an advocacy organization on campus that catered to a lot of the same communities.
18:58.411 --> 19:11.647
[SPEAKER_01]: Having lived on the Swan of Floor gave him a community so that when Kiddar showed up at social and cultural events on campus, he didn't need to begin every interaction with a ten-minute orientation session to who he was.
19:12.549 --> 19:15.431
[SPEAKER_01]: He could simply be, and that is crucial.
19:15.771 --> 19:21.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we often talk about colleges a place where young people discover themselves, and that's true.
19:21.894 --> 19:24.316
[SPEAKER_01]: But discovery doesn't happen in isolation.
19:24.956 --> 19:26.377
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens in community.
19:27.057 --> 19:31.040
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens when people see parts of themselves reflected back.
19:31.920 --> 19:50.049
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens when young adults encounter spaces, where they don't have to spend all their energy defending their existence, and that brings me back to Dr. Maria P. P. Root.
19:50.930 --> 19:54.191
[SPEAKER_01]: Maria Root has spent decades studying multiracial identity.
19:55.512 --> 19:58.174
[SPEAKER_01]: What she discovered was surprisingly simple.
20:01.801 --> 20:03.541
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't one destination.
20:03.761 --> 20:05.362
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't one correct answer.
20:06.462 --> 20:10.463
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, there are many ways people learn to live with complexity.
20:11.163 --> 20:15.004
[SPEAKER_01]: Many ways people navigate the borderlands between communities.
20:15.944 --> 20:23.306
[SPEAKER_01]: Root identified common categories mixed people develop to exist in the world authentically.
20:24.026 --> 20:27.467
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people place both feet firmly in both communities.
20:32.608 --> 20:39.712
[SPEAKER_01]: Some find their home on the border itself, among others who understand what it means to live between worlds.
20:41.153 --> 20:48.816
[SPEAKER_01]: And some establish a home base while continuing to make forays outward into other communities that shape them.
20:50.177 --> 20:53.799
[SPEAKER_01]: The important thing is, these are not boxes.
20:54.439 --> 20:55.980
[SPEAKER_01]: They are possibilities.
21:01.379 --> 21:02.621
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's start with the first.
21:08.469 --> 21:10.752
[SPEAKER_01]: Both feet in both communities.
21:11.940 --> 21:16.501
[SPEAKER_01]: When Githar was growing up, that was the world we intentionally created.
21:17.162 --> 21:19.883
[SPEAKER_01]: There were Hindu traditions, there were Christian traditions.
21:20.243 --> 21:26.225
[SPEAKER_01]: Temple, church, divali, Christmas, different prayers, different stories.
21:27.225 --> 21:29.366
[SPEAKER_01]: Different ways of understanding the world.
21:30.146 --> 21:33.487
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal was never to make him choose.
21:34.767 --> 21:36.848
[SPEAKER_03]: I am both Christian and Hindu.
21:36.908 --> 21:49.692
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't say I've done a huge amount of practice in either one in college, but I am, you know, I'm confirmed in the Episcopalian church and I had my genoid in it at the Monday or in Atlanta, which is of course like the coming of AIDS ceremony reflection on the Hindu side.
21:50.592 --> 21:57.574
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Kather again, talking about having his life rooted in both his white Christian and
22:00.165 --> 22:03.506
[SPEAKER_03]: I grew up every week going to church every Sunday in New Jersey.
22:03.526 --> 22:11.230
[SPEAKER_03]: I had a very, very welcoming congregation who was super chill with the fact that, for example, my mom is not baptized.
22:11.970 --> 22:13.911
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom did never want to convert Christianity.
22:14.431 --> 22:18.372
[SPEAKER_03]: My grandparents come to church when they come visit New Jersey.
22:18.512 --> 22:19.213
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody loves them.
22:19.693 --> 22:23.334
[SPEAKER_03]: I would talk about Hindu gods in church school and everybody was super interested.
22:23.775 --> 22:26.396
[SPEAKER_03]: So really, really great community to be a part of,
22:27.894 --> 22:36.697
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so grateful I had that upbringing in the Christian faith because like you see just all of Christianity on the news right now and I just love being able to call it total BS.
22:37.677 --> 22:47.580
[SPEAKER_03]: In Hershey, I mean the community at large was definitely the more conservative Christian side which is why I don't think I ever really connected with that place religiously.
22:48.320 --> 22:53.981
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, my mom couldn't take community and so I think for a little while I wouldn't take community because I was like, that's not cool.
22:56.082 --> 23:01.625
[SPEAKER_03]: They're all just like it's very, it's small town America, which like I said because I experienced it during summer time and football season.
23:01.665 --> 23:03.645
[SPEAKER_03]: I love in terms of my family.
23:04.366 --> 23:06.547
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time I was born, my grandmother had passed.
23:07.027 --> 23:10.349
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was just my grandpa out there and he is was awesome.
23:11.149 --> 23:12.469
[SPEAKER_03]: One of one of my favorite people ever.
23:13.590 --> 23:24.135
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, the fact that I was mixed, it was, I don't know that I, like, left it at the door necessarily when I went to Hershey, but it just never really came
23:25.090 --> 23:28.953
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I mean, my grandpa was never anything but loving and supportive.
23:29.073 --> 23:32.616
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think that Hershey is very much my like white American side.
23:33.416 --> 23:37.179
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was not much of an experience there at all.
23:38.180 --> 23:41.843
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal was to help him inherit all of it.
23:42.863 --> 23:48.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Not half of one thing and half of another, all of it.
23:49.411 --> 23:50.292
[SPEAKER_03]: because I've been saying the same.
23:51.052 --> 23:53.934
[SPEAKER_03]: That she's, I don't even think that was good, which is that I'm Indian and white.
23:54.274 --> 23:56.655
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Christian Hindu, I'm not like half of this or half of that.
23:57.356 --> 23:59.157
[SPEAKER_03]: And like I belong here just as much as you do.
24:00.158 --> 24:02.179
[SPEAKER_03]: But of course what I was saying was the same.
24:02.199 --> 24:04.880
[SPEAKER_03]: Like my name is Gator part lit, I'm Indian and white and I'm Christian and Hindu.
24:05.821 --> 24:06.722
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not one of the other.
24:07.382 --> 24:17.128
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I think, you know, kind of like later in high school and into college, I kind of just had had enough of those experiences where if I,
24:18.324 --> 24:20.045
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm in a space and I feel like I'm not welcome.
24:20.145 --> 24:29.428
[SPEAKER_03]: I just either, like if they're in grief, I have to stay at a stay and I just don't really care what anyone who does with me thinks or I just leave.
24:30.108 --> 24:38.571
[SPEAKER_03]: Because there are there are places that no one except me and I feel like the the kind of people who like really take your shoe with my identity.
24:39.531 --> 24:43.693
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's not my job to fix and they're not really people I want to be around in the meantime.
24:44.571 --> 24:49.253
[SPEAKER_01]: Another way that people can be mixed is home on the border.
24:51.334 --> 24:56.396
[SPEAKER_01]: Not everyone experiences mixed identity that way all the time or at all.
24:57.632 --> 25:00.433
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes experience has changed over time.
25:01.233 --> 25:05.134
[SPEAKER_01]: For some people, home isn't found in either community.
25:05.835 --> 25:11.777
[SPEAKER_01]: It's found among other people who understand what it means to move between worlds.
25:12.697 --> 25:16.778
[SPEAKER_01]: In high school, Kither was around other mixed kids all the time.
25:17.518 --> 25:21.680
[SPEAKER_01]: Within our family, he shared this experience with his cousins.
25:22.770 --> 25:32.161
[SPEAKER_01]: Being around other mixed people helped him see a universal experience of those who are balancing two or more cultures, religions, or ethnicities.
25:33.322 --> 25:35.805
[SPEAKER_01]: This is how Kather himself explains it.
25:36.853 --> 25:39.094
[SPEAKER_03]: as an Indian and white mixed kid.
25:39.194 --> 25:41.215
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's always nice to be around other Indian white mixed kids.
25:41.275 --> 25:42.055
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot of my cousins.
25:42.115 --> 25:44.556
[SPEAKER_03]: It's part of the reason why I love our extended family so much.
25:45.277 --> 25:49.979
[SPEAKER_03]: But like mixed kids don't need to be around there specific mix to feel like they belong.
25:50.019 --> 25:52.920
[SPEAKER_03]: Mix kids need to be around other mixed kids to feel like they belong.
25:53.240 --> 25:58.923
[SPEAKER_03]: Being mixed, race, culture, religion, absolutely anything like having multiple identities coming out.
25:58.943 --> 26:00.223
[SPEAKER_03]: You're from multiple sides to your family.
26:00.243 --> 26:01.284
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes having to connect them.
26:01.304 --> 26:04.045
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes having to run interference and code switch between them.
26:04.460 --> 26:09.304
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a universal experience, no matter what your combination of.
26:10.044 --> 26:20.972
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, I had friends who were Indian and black, Indian and black, Bengali and black, Colombian and Dominican, or any mix of anything.
26:20.992 --> 26:26.156
[SPEAKER_03]: Christian and Jewish, and it is just a shared experience, no matter what.
26:26.706 --> 26:31.508
[SPEAKER_01]: What Kather is describing is what Ruth called finding a home on the border.
26:32.288 --> 26:37.851
[SPEAKER_01]: A community where details may differ but the experience feels familiar.
26:38.991 --> 26:41.913
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where people understand code switching.
26:42.873 --> 26:46.917
[SPEAKER_01]: Some mixed people decisively claim the border as home.
26:47.758 --> 27:00.269
[SPEAKER_01]: They identify most strongly, not with either parents' community, but with the experience of being mixed, with what the Chicana scholar Gloria and Zaldua calls mestiza consciousness.
27:01.450 --> 27:05.894
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the people who say, I am neither one thing nor the other.
27:33.483 --> 27:35.664
[SPEAKER_01]: this isn't in authenticity.
27:36.304 --> 27:37.384
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not betrayal.
27:38.045 --> 27:39.245
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not pretending.
27:40.405 --> 27:46.007
[SPEAKER_01]: It's recognizing that different parts of ourselves become more visible in different places.
27:46.988 --> 27:58.412
[SPEAKER_01]: When I asked Gither about spending time in Hershey, Pennsylvania, John's hometown, and Atlanta, Georgia, my hometown, he described exactly that experience.
28:00.705 --> 28:06.808
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a period of time where I liked going to Hershey more than Atlanta, but that was mostly because I had cousins in Atlanta that I thought were really annoying.
28:07.888 --> 28:08.549
[SPEAKER_03]: Now I love them.
28:08.589 --> 28:15.612
[SPEAKER_03]: I love being a big brother, but it was just an adjustment when you're an only child, and then suddenly in the summertime, you have three younger siblings following you around my ducklings.
28:16.532 --> 28:17.352
[SPEAKER_03]: I love them so much.
28:18.833 --> 28:21.534
[SPEAKER_03]: And so for a little while, I liked being like the center of attention in Hershey.
28:22.195 --> 28:22.595
[SPEAKER_03]: I think...
28:24.199 --> 28:34.642
[SPEAKER_03]: Like place aside, I definitely like because I'm white passing, I compensate by like trying to know more and participate more in Indian and Hindu things.
28:35.562 --> 28:41.424
[SPEAKER_03]: I never, you know, like I never feel like I have to prove anything by going to church or like eating a sandwich.
28:42.604 --> 28:50.147
[SPEAKER_03]: And I love, and that's also partially, it's difficult because I love my church community, the one that I grew up in, but I don't really love a lot of other ones.
28:52.658 --> 29:00.142
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I guess I don't really know where I'm going there, but no, I think that, yeah, I think that Hershey and Atlanta are just places where I take different parts of myself.
29:00.423 --> 29:09.908
[SPEAKER_01]: He's describing how the individual can move fluidly between communities, bringing different parts of themselves to the foreground, depending on where they are.
29:10.749 --> 29:14.511
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, a mixed-reased child with a black grandmother.
29:15.491 --> 29:18.153
[SPEAKER_01]: When at Grandma's House, blackness is front and center.
29:19.718 --> 29:23.140
[SPEAKER_01]: at a predominantly wide school, the presentation may be different.
29:24.241 --> 29:30.744
[SPEAKER_01]: Root was careful to say that this is not switching loyalties, and it is not in authenticity.
29:31.545 --> 29:37.508
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a sophisticated social skill, the ability to read a room and respond to its cues.
29:39.300 --> 29:49.883
[SPEAKER_01]: The danger comes when a child starts to feel that shifting is not a choice, but a survival mechanism, and it's something they don't like, but they have to do it to fit in.
29:51.924 --> 29:57.386
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is, for mixed people, no single space ever holds all of who they are.
29:58.026 --> 30:03.488
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not confusion, that's adaptation, that's growth, that's being human.
30:13.584 --> 30:19.988
[SPEAKER_01]: The fourth pathway, route described, is creating a home base and making for raise outward.
30:20.949 --> 30:25.751
[SPEAKER_01]: This is when an individual establish a primary racial culture or religious home base.
30:26.572 --> 30:32.535
[SPEAKER_01]: Place that meets their psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual needs over an extended period of time.
30:33.636 --> 30:36.918
[SPEAKER_01]: From that grounded place, they venture into other communities.
30:37.418 --> 30:39.779
[SPEAKER_01]: but they always have somewhere to return to.
30:40.480 --> 30:44.922
[SPEAKER_01]: Crucially, root understood that this is not a permanent arrangement.
30:45.582 --> 30:48.544
[SPEAKER_01]: People can change how they identify over a lifetime.
30:48.824 --> 30:53.627
[SPEAKER_01]: A home base at 20 does not mean the same home base at 40.
30:54.567 --> 31:02.552
[SPEAKER_01]: What makes this fourth way important to understand is that it can look from the outside, like someone has simply chosen a side.
31:03.651 --> 31:09.355
[SPEAKER_01]: And that misreading by family members by teachers, by peers, can cause real harm.
31:10.236 --> 31:20.604
[SPEAKER_01]: When someone has found a home base that gives them stability and belonging, the last thing they need is to be accused of betraying or abandoning the other parts of themselves.
31:21.424 --> 31:22.185
[SPEAKER_01]: They have not.
31:22.765 --> 31:26.348
[SPEAKER_01]: They are standing somewhere solid enough to keep their footing.
31:29.002 --> 31:31.825
[SPEAKER_02]: There's definitely a lot of hypothetical directions that go in.
31:32.545 --> 31:50.924
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a facet of that that concerns me that I think a lot of diasporic is can relate to regardless of whether or not you're mixed race is that like when you know as generations go on in the United States culture as hard as we may try does get diluted a little bit I grew up in like rich and vibrant Indian culture and
31:52.393 --> 32:02.176
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, God forbid when my grandparents or my parents are not around, I am not, I don't know how confident I am in my ability to pass that culture on solely, you know?
32:02.236 --> 32:12.779
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, that culture doesn't just come from a single parent, it comes from, you know, like on the Indian side, for example, it comes from going to some auntie's house to do my homework after school.
32:13.400 --> 32:17.321
[SPEAKER_02]: It comes from talking to other Indian kids, I don't know, like I, I
32:19.592 --> 32:45.839
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still coming to understand and I have a lot more conversations to have with my parents about just how intentionally they structured by upbringing because for example, I mean, I didn't go to church, I didn't go to church while I was in college once I left home, but I definitely carried the lessons that learning about the Bible as well as the practical lessons that my very loving and progressive church community gave me throughout the first 18 years of my life and I
32:48.192 --> 33:03.347
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't eat Indian food every single day, you know, once left to my own devices, I'll catch college, I love cooking Indian food, but the way that my grandmother cooks fresh, fresh food for lunch and dinner every day is just not always something that is me crazy practical to do when you're 20 and you have five mentors next week.
33:05.852 --> 33:21.649
[SPEAKER_02]: So I have, I have been gifted such rich vibrant culture from both sides and how to continue it is definitely something that I am still grappling with when I think like I said that that any diasporic kid can relate to that.
33:22.270 --> 33:26.014
[SPEAKER_02]: I think all I can aim to do kind of in this like very
33:27.255 --> 33:47.303
[SPEAKER_02]: very formative next decade of my life is, you know, remember, remember the best of both sides find, try to find ways to cultivate both sides of my identity and experiences involving both sides of my identity as best I can, I think it's really easy to
33:48.323 --> 34:10.767
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, to, you know, blink and suddenly it's been five years and you haven't done this, like this cultural thing that you always used to do as a kid or you haven't seen this family member in a really long time and I think really the best I can do for myself in any situation and I mean for, you know, any future family that I may have is just to stay intentional about keeping in touch and figuring out how to practically engage with with every side of my culture.
34:17.535 --> 34:22.260
[SPEAKER_01]: People change, communities change, life changes.
34:23.501 --> 34:29.808
[SPEAKER_01]: A person may spend years rooted in one identity and later discover another part of themselves calling for attention.
34:30.489 --> 34:38.077
[SPEAKER_01]: That may happen because they've changed places or had someone important come into their life that brings out a particular part of them.
34:39.018 --> 34:45.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it can just be because the way they think about themselves has changed as they move through the stages of life.
34:46.040 --> 34:47.441
[SPEAKER_01]: The point isn't arriving.
34:48.021 --> 34:50.041
[SPEAKER_01]: The point is remaining open to growth.
34:50.922 --> 34:58.264
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where I find myself as a parent, because one of the hardest lessons of parenting is accepting possibility.
34:59.124 --> 35:01.285
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't control who my child becomes.
35:02.220 --> 35:22.593
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't control where he'll live, who he'll love, what communities will become important to him, what traditions he'll carry forward, or which ones he'll set aside, and maybe that's exactly how it should be, because identity isn't something we hand our children fully formed.
35:23.213 --> 35:30.198
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something they build, one relationship, one community, one experience at a time.
35:41.343 --> 35:46.198
[SPEAKER_01]: 24 hours after we recorded this conversation, K. There are boarded a plane for Thailand.
35:47.137 --> 35:49.618
[SPEAKER_01]: And if Maria rude taught us anything, it's this.
35:50.179 --> 35:51.719
[SPEAKER_01]: Identity isn't static.
35:52.219 --> 35:53.880
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a destination.
35:54.140 --> 35:55.641
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a final answer.
35:56.061 --> 35:56.922
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a process.
35:57.622 --> 35:59.363
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of relationships.
35:59.703 --> 36:01.384
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of communities.
36:01.564 --> 36:03.425
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of discoveries.
36:04.585 --> 36:11.689
[SPEAKER_01]: As parents, teachers, mentors and friends, our job is not to decide who young people will become.
36:12.801 --> 36:16.863
[SPEAKER_01]: Our job is to create spaces where they can discover that for themselves.
36:17.743 --> 36:23.305
[SPEAKER_01]: Spaces that reduce the explanation tax, Spaces that make belonging possible.
36:24.246 --> 36:30.849
[SPEAKER_01]: Spaces that say you don't need permission, you don't need to prove yourself before you can participate.
36:31.469 --> 36:33.450
[SPEAKER_01]: You already belong.
36:34.850 --> 36:42.817
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if our goal is to raise healthy mixed race and mixed faith children, that's ultimately what we're trying to give them.
36:44.318 --> 36:59.170
[SPEAKER_01]: Not certainty, not a final identity, but something much more important, a place to stand, a place from which they can explore, a place from which they can grow.
37:00.669 --> 37:10.518
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where they don't have to explain themselves before they can become themselves, and every child deserves that.
37:23.562 --> 37:27.584
[SPEAKER_01]: Three decades ago, I fell in love with a man in the most unlikely place.
37:28.564 --> 37:37.669
[SPEAKER_01]: A woman from Atlanta, whose family immigrated from India, fell in love with a wider piscabalian from Pennsylvania in Jerusalem of all places.
37:38.349 --> 37:50.315
[SPEAKER_01]: That story took us back home where we navigated complex path to getting married and integrating our families and making our traditions, rituals, religions, and lives work together.
37:51.342 --> 37:57.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Two decades ago, Kather appeared in the world and I asked the question, can he be both?
37:58.666 --> 38:11.012
[SPEAKER_01]: Can we raise him in a way that his mixed life and identity will manifest itself in the world that honors every aspect of his parents and their heritages?
38:12.232 --> 38:26.465
[SPEAKER_01]: As he's grown and gone out into the world as an independent young man, I've seen him navigate how to be a mixed kid, both Hindu and Christian, both white and Indian, in New Jersey, in Atlanta, and in Berkeley.
38:27.005 --> 38:37.254
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, as I speak today, he's on a plane for Thailand to work at a university for displaced Burmese students who have very few resources and places for education.
38:38.095 --> 38:42.497
[SPEAKER_01]: He'll be gone a year and I don't know who he'll become when he comes home.
38:42.877 --> 38:46.558
[SPEAKER_01]: What I do know is that it is possible to be both.
38:47.098 --> 38:48.879
[SPEAKER_01]: It is possible to be rooted.
38:49.599 --> 38:55.181
[SPEAKER_01]: It is possible to carry on languages and the love of every aspect of who you are.
38:56.021 --> 38:59.643
[SPEAKER_01]: My hope is not that he comes back the same person.
39:00.383 --> 39:03.604
[SPEAKER_01]: The one that is a perfect clone of both me and John.
39:04.079 --> 39:19.963
[SPEAKER_01]: My hope is that he comes home more fully himself, living in every possibility of his existence with the intention and care to pass on every aspect of who he is to the person he loves and his family in the future.
39:33.351 --> 39:34.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening to Mixed.
39:35.232 --> 39:38.492
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the last episode, but it isn't the end of the story.
39:38.953 --> 39:41.293
[SPEAKER_01]: Please like, subscribe, and tell others.
39:41.893 --> 39:45.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Look in the show notes for the course pack, so you can assign this in your class.
39:46.535 --> 39:48.195
[SPEAKER_01]: And we chat via my website.
39:48.555 --> 39:58.498
[SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like me to speak to your academic, religious, or civic audience, I'm Dr. Kathy Joshee reminding you that you may have multiple identities, but you're always whole.
39:59.972 --> 40:09.696
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was created by me, Dr. Kathy Joshee, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and Access Mundi Media.
40:10.456 --> 40:17.359
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley O'Neshi, and the original music and engineering by Scott O'Kamoto.
40:18.039 --> 40:20.640
[SPEAKER_01]: Carry O'Neshi provided production assistance.
40:21.300 --> 40:23.301
[SPEAKER_01]: Our story editor is Leah Payne.
40:23.961 --> 40:33.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation and is made in collaboration with a party and the Under God's project.
