#84: Raising a Multiracial Family (with Marc & Tryphena Gagnon)
“We hired a babysitter for our son, and when he arrived—and was mixed-race—our son said, “Mama, he looks like me!” If you’ve always had people older than you who looked like you, you might not understand how special this is.”
I’m joined this week by my good friends Marc & Tryphena Gagnon, who share their story so far raising their multiracial family. Marc is of French Canadian heritage and Tryphena’s family is from India, and they have learned a lot about one another and themselves as they raise their mixed-race children to understand and own their racial identities and engage with the world around them in compassion and love. Marc is also the teaching pastor at Lakeside Church in Guelph.
Tryphena recommends the following books:
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Little People, BIG DREAMS series), by Maria isabel Sanchez Vegara
Rosa Parks (Little People, BIG DREAMS series), by Lisbeth Kaiser
Visit Marc & Tryphena’s church at lakesidechurch.ca
Support me and my work at patreon.com/jonathanpuddle
Order by new devotional, You Are Enough: Learning to Love Yourself the Way God Loves You.
Find every book or resource I’ve talked about on my Amazon storefront, in Canada, the United States or the United Kingdom.
Just in time for Christmas comes a wild ride of a B-Side. Looking back at our interview with Lisa Sharon Harper, Tryphena and I reflected on themes of forgiveness and reparations, the gift of tongues as Indigenous celebration, how the monarcy dehumanizes people, the emotional impact on Europeans of that dehumanization, the myth of an American Christian nation and more. We were both deeply impacted by Lisa’s book Fortune and so we sounded off, big time.