160/ Raising a Brown Child in a Time of Genocide w/ Nikesh Shukla

The Fire These Times: Voices from the Periphery

For episode 160, Dana El Kurd, Fabien Goa and Elia Ayoub are joined by Nikesh Shukla to discuss his book 'Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home' which the three of us read with Gaza on our mind (although it was written in 2021 and is not on Palestine).

More broadly, we talked about what it's like to raise a brown kid in a world where racialized lives are easily disposable.

On Brown Baby:

From the editor of The Good Immigrant.

We have to believe in hope in these dark uncertain times. Hope brings us together.

How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is racist, sexist and facing climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer?

Nikesh Shukla explores themes of racism, feminism, parenting and our shifting ideas of home. This heartbreaking, compelling, intensely relatable memoir is a love letter to the author’s late mother – who passed away just before his eldest daughter was born – and to his two young daughters. In Brown Baby, Shukla examines, with humour and sharp, beautiful prose, how to raise the next generation with a sense of joy in an often bleak world.

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Credits:

• Host(s): Dana El Kurd, Fabien Goa and Elia J. Ayoub

• Producer: Elia J. Ayoub

• Guest: Nikesh Shukla

• Music: ⁠Rap and Revenge⁠

• Sound editor: Mae-Li Evans (May-Lee)

• Episode designer: Elia J. Ayoub

• Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple

• Original TFTT design: Wenyi Geng

• TFTT Transcripts: Antidotezine