Mixed: Stories and Strategies for Multiracial and Interfaith Families

From the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), and Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), Mixed is a podcast about forming strong mixed race and mixed faith families and relationships. Mixed people - especially mixed kids with multiple ethnic, racial and religious identities - experience marginalization and acceptance in ways that are different from monoracial and religious minori...

In the first episode of Mixed, Khyati Joshi, a scholar whose work today maps the intersections of religion, race, history and law in America, takes us back to 1995, when she arrived in Jerusalem as a young Indian American Hindu woman and unexpectedly fell in love with John, a White American Christian man. 

What began under the golden light of Jerusalem soon became a collision with family expectations, immigrant identity, religi...

In Episode 2 of Mixed, Khyati and John move from winning her parents’ reluctant acceptance to the complicated work of planning a wedding that could honor both of their families, cultures, and faiths. What should have been a celebration quickly becomes a series of encounters with racism, white privilege, and assumptions about whose traditions belong—encounters that stunned Khyati, John and her parents. 

Khyati reflec...

Interracial and interfaith couples build strong bonds and make space for each other at home and in the world. But what happens when two people become three or more? 

In Episode 3 of Mixed, Khyati and John face a new chapter in their interracial, interfaith marriage: raising a child. When their son Kedhar is born, they begin the complicated work of giving him a sense of belonging in a world that often insists mixed-race and mixe...

Can a mixed race, mixed faith person feel fully “both?”

In Episode 4, Khyati traces her son’s journey from a backseat conversation with a Muslim friend to his dual rites of passage — a Hindu coming-of-age ceremony and confirmation in the Episcopal church — and the deliberate choices behind them: two prayers at the dinner table, a baptism blessed with water from both the Ganges and the River Jordan, and ...