At the beginning of February, Teen Vogue announced its new executive editor, Samhita Mukhopadhyay. The news came just three months after Radhika Jones was appointed editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Both women are the first Indian Americans to hold their respective titles at these prestigious publications, blazing new trails for desis in media and advancing desi representation in general.

Mukhopadhyay, 39, was the former senior editorial director of culture and identities at Mic.com, the former executive editor of Feministing.com, and, as we learned, her roots in social justice date back to her years as a teenager. We sat down with Mukhopadhyay at Teen Vogue's headquarters in New York City to discuss her new role, her advice for Indian-origin teenagers, and her relationship with Indian culture.

Tell me about your career arc and how you arrived at Teen Vogue. I have a women's studies undergraduate and graduate degree, so I started pretty young in terms of being really invested in women's issues and feminist issues. Even as a teenager I was always calling out my parents on double standards they had for me and my brother, like, “Why does he not have to do work in the kitchen and I have to do work in the kitchen—I'm not doing work in the kitchen!”

Probably the most monumental thing in my career was when I started blogging at Feministing in 2005. At the time, I was working as a substitute school teacher and involved in social justice, but not really sure what I wanted to do. So I started blogging on top of working and, basically, through that got my first book deal. And then I spent the next couple of years going between freelance writing and working a lot in digital strategy. I've worked on several jobs that involved taking people's content strategies and figuring out how to really engage people online with them. So it was kind of a natural fit to come to a place like Teen Vogue where they're at the intersection of activism and this growing young population who are very invested in social and political issues, and has done really groundbreaking work on that. But also pivoting in terms of how to really make it impactful in the digital space.

What is your vision for, say, six months down the line? What will Teen Vogue look like under your leadership? I'm really committed to and interested in expanding and deepening our political coverage. I think we've done an amazing job in terms of covering a vast array of topics and really claiming our space in that, and gaining some respectability in that space.

I'd like to see us elevate more stories of the young people who are leading these initiatives. Right now we're working with several of the survivors from Parkland [Florida]. We published an op-ed from someone who survived last weekend. And really learning that young people trust our brand enough to bring us their stories, and that we'll do a good job with them. So, I hope to see a lot more of that.

I'm also really interested in profiling the teens who are now—there are teens running for office across the country and who are getting involved in the political process. Also balancing [content] with, you know, people want to be fashionable, they want to be, like, it's OK to take selfies and look cute in them with your political quotes. I love our style and beauty coverage. I'm so impressed with it, and I want to see us doing more of that.

My vision for six months is that we take over the senate and the house [laughs].

You mentioned op-eds. Are there other things you're currently working on that you're excited about? We're working on a series of investigative pieces around gun violence in the country. I think there's many pieces of the debate that are coming out right now that we're not talking about in concrete enough terms… and the issues we're not talking about are, like, toxic masculinity, and being exposed to violent behaviour, and all of these other kind of societal ills that lead to these moments, and so we want to dig into that debate.

What is the biggest misconception about teenagers today? That they only care about selfies. That they're vain. And they're always texting and on their phones, which they are, but so are we. People of all ages are on their phone all the time. And that they're not engaged politically.

We're now dealing with the youngest group of millennials and, if anything, we're into Gen Z. Millennials are criticised the same way, yet they are out here changing the world. They are some of the most innovative people in the economy; they're leaders in political movements. There's so much exciting stuff happening, and I think the same is true [for teenagers]. Now they're educated and they have social media and they're ready to take on those powers.

What are the major issues impacting teens today? I can speak for Teen Vogue readers, I think more so than [all] teens. I was obsessed with New Kids on the Block when I was a teenager. Jordan Knight: I still follow him on Instagram [laughs]. So, obviously, they're very interested in pop culture and love Beyoncé and Rihanna and all of the same things that teens of every generation have always been interested in. But of the things I have noticed is that they're very interested in gender identity. Even working at an office that's a younger office, I'm finding the comfort with gender fluidity and being really cognisant of peoples preferred gender pronouns. These are things that I haven't seen in older work environments. They're very interested in gender expression, gender nonconformity, and trans visibility.

I've noticed a lot of interesting cultural appropriation and making sure you're always tracing things to the right root and understanding whether it's appropriate or not to do something.

You mentioned Teen Vogue's readership, and not necessarily being able to speak to all teens. How representative is Teen Vogue's readership of teens in general? I think fairly representative. Even just in that we have a sizeable readership and that we have a lot of teens who really look up to the brand as aspirational, which is exciting and really why I came here. But I do think we are very cutting edge; if you look at other teen publications, they don't focus and prioritise politics and social justice in the same way. That's not to say that Teen Vogue readers and our staff don't also love makeup and heels and dresses and all of that—we do. But I do think that because Teen Vogue really prioritising the social justice themes has developed a devout audience for us, but it's a specific audience.

What advice do you have for teenagers and, more specifically, desi teenagers? Don't listen to your parents. It will work out OK [laughs]. Yeah, no, my advice to all teenagers is to stay woke. I think there has to be, more than ever, ways for us to stay optimistic, because it can feel very overwhelming how many things we have to worry about right now outside of your day-to-day anxiety of, like, “Is he going to text me back,” which is a real thing. There's climate change, there's Trump in the White House, there's just so many things to be anxious about right now. So finding ways to stay optimistic and to be innovative in a time when things are a little bit chaotic. Because in that chaos there's also possibility, and that's why I'm so inspired by teens, because I do feel like they are so creative amidst all the chaos.

Specifically for desi teenagers, I would really like to see some leadership in the South Asian community talking more openly about the relationship between police brutality and black racism, and Asian American exceptionalism and the model minority myth. I'm so disappointed to see how many South Asian actors and actresses and spokespeople are silent on a lot of those issues. I do think that connection really needs to be made, because often I find that as a South Asian woman people will say, “Oh, well, we have a woman of colour spokesperson for this”. “Privilege” is the wrong word—but I have that kind of social acceptability without it being interrogated in terms of like, “What were the privileges that I experienced that are different than if I were black or latino, or came from a poorer community or didn't have access to the same kind of education?” I worry about that. My parents were immigrants and they had to work so hard to get us to school and do all of that; they did internalise this myth that they were somehow better than other minorities. I worry about how that impacts another generation.

One of the things I loved about Aziz Ansari's Master of None was his relationship with Lena in it. I talked to one of my dear friends Rashad Robinson [American civil rights spokesperson] and we talked about how black and Indian relationships are never on television, but they are these really important friendships because often you might both be growing up in predominantly white areas where you don't have another person of colour, so your bestie will end up being the other person of colour in that school.

Let's talk about your relationship with India. Growing up, you split your time between India and the United States. Can you speak to that and your current-day relationship with Indian culture? I'm Bengali. Like, I'm such a Bengali [laughs]. Whenever I tell people I'm a writer and I'm Bengali they're like, “We're not surprised.” I did spend a lot of time in India as a child. My parents went back and forth a lot. We come from a huge family, so I have over 60 cousins, and a bunch of them actually live in the States now.

I have a very complex relationship with Indian culture. Because the core of my work has been gender identity and sexuality, I have not always appreciated what some of the cultural traditions have been. I am aware enough to know that they're not unique to Indian culture, and that's why I'm not like, “You're uniquely more sexist than your white counterparts,” because I think that's a myth. But that said, in my own experience, my father is still upset that I'm not married yet; he doesn't understand it. Or when I go to India they're kind of like, “Oh, you're just the woman-child. We're not interested.” But my brother gets all this attention and all this interest, and that kind of sexism that's really embedded in the culture [is what] I was very critical of. But, I also think it's an ancient culture with a lot of different perspectives, and they have amazing, amazing feminist movements in India.

So I came up on South Asian feminists, like Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak. That allowed me to dig back into my South Asian roots, because I did feel very alienated when I had this very strong gender analysis, but I didn't see other people who looked like me in the feminist movement. So [I tried] finding other ways in; for me it was really black feminism and Indian feminism that brought me back into it to really look at and understand my mother's life or my grandmother's life. And so I feel really proud to be an Indian, and I feel really inspired by what a robust, vast, and complex culture it is, and all the possibilities that are there.

Who are some Indians you look up to? I do look up to Mindy [Kaling]. I think she's a really talented joke writer. She broke into an industry that was really hard to break into as a woman, let alone a woman of colour, let alone a dark-skinned woman of colour who's not skinny.

I'm really inspired by the Blank Noise project. It's these women who are doing public actions in India where they physically take up space to show that women are allowed to own and have their own physical space. They'll go into a crowded market space—it's like a flash mob, but they just stand still and they won't move, and so you have to walk around them. It's a protest but it's also performance art around owning your own space and owning your own body. It's a response to street harassment and sexual assault.

What strides would you like to see the Indian community make in the next few years? I would like to see more [South Asians] being more vocal politically. Not just in terms of solidarity with other ethnic groups, but I would like to see us—and this is both South Asians and Asians—you know, when something like the Muslim ban happens I would like to see the South Asian community come together and say, “No, absolutely not.” Or, God forbid there's another attack on a Sikh temple, for their immediate response to not be, “Oh, but we're not muslims.” Because we need the next sentence. We need to say, “Who cares if we're muslims? None of us should experience this kind of violence.”

And I would like to see more visibility. I'm glad Mindy Kaling is out there, but she's just one person. I would like to see more South Asian—women in particular—creators being in charge of their own narratives.