“Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can’t protect you from everything…I can’t protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can’t even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn’t.” 

Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

the conversation.

The most prominent theme of this book to me (unsurprisingly, given the article the book was inspired by) was the portrayal of Mira Jacobs’ conversations with her six year old, mixed race son. I was stricken by his questions about race and race relations at such a young age, because they really made me think about how early the internalization and exposure to racism can start for a person of color in America.

I was utterly horrified by a six year old asking his mother how to know which white people are afraid of brown people, if the new president would hate him because of his Muslim name, if his own (white) father was afraid of him because of his brown skin. I was sickeningly unsurprised that many of these questions were triggered by the hateful and racist rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump and his supporters during his election campaign and presidency, and as a result of it.

Both Jacobs’ child’s questions and her personal experiences with micro and macro racial aggressions not only made some of my experiences feel seen, but also reminded me of how the sheer quantity of my own outwardly racist interactions have dramatically increased since the time of Trump’s election. Some of the more prevalent ones in the past year alone, have included:

• A student in the Young Adult Literature class I co-taught at UC Berkeley rolling her eyes, rudely gesturing, and glaring at me during my entire hour-long lecture on the importance of Asian American and South Asian-American literature, particularly anytime I mentioned why representation of Asian minorities was important.
• Waiting to board my flight to Italy for my post-college travels: An older white American man jokingly telling me he was glad I opened my black duffel bag in front of him before we boarded, because he thought I “might have a bomb in there.”
• Stepping out of my car in downtown Seattle a few weeks ago and immediately being accosted by a middle aged white woman yelling a long chain of angry racial threats (including: “die, you f*c king Indian b * tch!”) and blocking my entrance to the sidewalk, moving to continue to do so as I tried to walk away from her.

“Sometimes, you go along with it and pretend nothing happened. Sometimes, you hold your breath until the feeling of wanting to be believed passes. Sometimes, you weigh explaining against staying quiet and know they’re both just different kinds of heavy.” 

Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

There were so many other pieces of the book that I resonated with and related to, particularly around colorism, as well as conversations around immigrant experiences such as post 9/11 racism that I know members of my family can relate to — too many to fully explain and do justice to. So, I’ve chosen to focus on this theme as the one I’ll expand on, and comment on some of the other themes that really stuck out to me through the author’s words herself.

finding allies.

“There’s a particular kind of close you get when you find someone you can trust in a space you don’t.” 

Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

white “progressives.”