Dear Prudence,
My girlfriend and I have been together for four years. We met soon after college. Neither of us is particularly great at social interaction and we are really lucky to have each other. My girlfriend is Indian-Americanish (she was born in India but moved here when she was 7). Most of our friend circle is Indians—I’m the token white guy. We’re both pretty shy people so our friend circle is mostly people who we met through either her brother or my friends from college, who all happen to be Indian. I’m white, and so are my parents. My dad is no longer with us, but my mom’s met my girlfriend and really likes her. She’s supportive, but she’s been living in the same small town since she was born. The town is mostly white, with a neighboring town being mostly Black, and my mother very rarely ventures out of a few neighboring towns, so she’s had very little exposure to Indian culture. My girlfriend gets kind of uncomfortable about the way that my mom treats her.
My girlfriend is vegetarian (I don’t cook meat in the house but I still eat meat outside the house). My mom wanted to accommodate her and spent so much time agonizing about the meals she could cook, even though she regularly makes lasagna and it isn’t difficult to make lasagna vegetarian. Every single time my mom talks to my girlfriend, it’s about my girlfriend being Indian. Conversations include asking my girlfriend to show pictures of “more of those pretty Indian dresses,“ asking her to pronounce random Ethiopian and Nigerian names (you know, since Nigeria and India are practically the same place/s…), asking my girlfriend to speak in “Indian” (she’s fluent in Tamil, conversational in Telugu, and has a passing knowledge of Hindi and Malayalam), asking if it’s true that all Hindus are cannibals and if all Indians have awful eyesight and wear glasses. I’ve heard my mom bragging about my girlfriend to other people, exclusively referring to her as my “Indian girlfriend.” My mom makes my girlfriend very uncomfortable but my girlfriend also acknowledges that being that my mom’s from an insular small town in a red state, her attitude could be a lot worse. We both agree that it is worth having a conversation with my mom about—we’re talking about getting married, and we definitely want to have kids someday, and we want to get this sorted out before we bring mixed-race kids into the world. I’m not really sure how to phrase this. I’m worried my mom might take it the wrong way—her heart is in the right place, she just needs to stop treating her like my “Indian girlfriend” and instead just treat her like my girlfriend.
—Making Mom Less Racist