From Boxes to Watercolors: Rethinking Data and Belonging for Multiracial People

When I was five days old, my father filled out my birth certificate paperwork at a clinic in Brussels, Belgium. When he wrote my name, he was told he needed special permission to use that name for me. After several visits to the vital records office and an official letter from the Indian embassy, the clinic finally agreed to enter my name. I was a newborn but already too complicated for the form. I am Indian and White American, and for as long as I can remember, official forms have had a place to put half of me but nowhere my whole self.

I’m not alone in this: 34 million people in the US now identify as Multiracial, a population that grew by 276 percent between 2010 and 2020. Some of that growth is people finally being able to claim all of who they are on a form. You would not know any of this from looking at the nonprofit and philanthropic sector’s own infrastructure. Our data systems, our everyday language, and the assumptions baked into how we organize solidarity are all built around the idea that everyone fits into exactly one box. Even some of the most progressive organizations fighting every day for racial justice do not “see” or account for the Multiracial experience.

From the very little research available, we know that Multiracial people are at a higher risk of social isolation and feeling a lack of belonging. Social isolation increases your risk of heart disease, a stroke, and mental health problems. Many people report that they are not accepted in any of their specific racial groups. And when so much energy is spent combatting our own loneliness, it can inhibit our ability to contribute fully. This was certainly true for me and is a big part of my forthcoming book, Multitudes: The Multiracial Experience and How to Forge a Culture of Absolute Belonging.

Asking the Right Questions

In Multitudes, I introduce a woman named Fatima. Her father is from Ethiopia; her mother is Italian and Irish American. She grew up in the United States and identifies as an American. Most people perceive her as Black, but she thinks of herself as biracial. When she took a DNA test, she learned that 75 percent of her ancestry is Southern Italian. This explained why she had Beta Thalassemia, a blood condition that is common in southern Italy. Like many Multiracial people, her genetic ancestry, her appearance, her name, and her nationality all point in different directions. Her name is Muslim, her appearance is Black, her nationality is the US, and she is also a second-generation immigrant. As a child, she thought of herself as African American, but in college she began to identify as biracial. What box should Fatima check on the question about race?

Not only do people lose the solidarity of a community, but this kind of exclusion also leaves Multiracial people with nowhere to turn when facing racism, discrimination, and everyday microaggressions.

The first challenge for Fatima is that until 2000, the US Census didn’t allow anyone to select more than one race. In the nonprofit sector, most of the intake forms, grantee reporting templates, and eligibility surveys  were built on that same older logic: pick one box or land in an “other” category. I call it the junk drawer of identities that no one analyzes, and no program gets designed around “other” categories. For most of my life, I chose “other” on questions about race. The changes to the census have trickled down to some other forms, but I still have to “pick one” more often than not. While allowing people to check off more than one race is a good place to start, it is just the beginning of what is needed to capture the data relevant to our evolving programs and policies.

The assumption underneath the box is that race, identity, ancestry, appearance, and nationality will all sort themselves into one neat answer. They don’t. Most forms—intake forms, grantee reports, and eligibility surveys—assume that all these categories are congruent and interchangeable. Race becomes a proxy for all these other concepts. For Multiracial people, however, they are not the same data point. Health service providers need to understand Fatima’s ancestry to assess her risk for Beta Thalassemia and to interpret her lab results correctly. Her employer may want to understand how she self-identifies to invite her to join specific employee resource groups. Those are two different questions, and a single race checkbox answers neither of them well.

Nonprofits also know very well that a system cannot serve a population that it can’t see. The fix starts with asking: What do you really want to know? And: How will you use the data? A form built to catch a genetic risk factor should ask about ancestry, not race. A program built around an eligibility rule should ask about nationality or self-identification and not assume race will stand in for it. Research about discrimination or mental health issues may want to ask detailed questions about all these concepts. A demographic count should let people mark every race that applies, with room to write in a specific combination, and then actually report Multiracial respondents as their own group instead of letting them disappear into “two or more races” as an undifferentiated bucket.

Building a Multiracial Community Centered on Belonging

Even when the data starts to represent us, the culture hasn’t caught up, starting with the fact that we don’t agree on what to call ourselves. There’s a growing, but far from settled, consensus that “Multiracial” or “mixed” are the best terms available, though neither is perfect. “Multiracial” can reinforce the idea that “race” is a real, distinct biological category to begin with, one that then gets combined inside us. “Mixed” carries a whiff of confusion, or worse, an echo of animal breeding. Tiger Woods didn’t like any of the options and invented his own word, “Cablinasian,” to name his particular blend of Black, Thai, Chinese, Dutch, and Native American heritage. I’ve done the same thing privately, playing with mashups like Gergali and Benrican to fuse Bengali, Indian, American, German, and English into something that felt like mine. None of them stuck. These days I’m trying on “Multiracial.”

I’m not claiming Multiracial people hold some unique key to a post-racial world, or that this capacity is exclusive to us, but it is real, and it is currently invisible to a field that still mostly asks us to pick a side.

The deeper problem isn’t the missing word; it’s the missing community. Multiracial people are frequently excluded from all their racial communities. As someone with brown skin, an unfamiliar name (my previous name was Bhattacharyya), and a “foreign” dad, I was told in a wide range of ways that I wasn’t American. When I lived in India, I was never considered Indian due to my unfamiliarity with various cultural norms and lack of fluency in Bengali. I’ve never felt fully American nor Indian, always something in between. Multiracial people who are both Black and White are often excluded from Black communities because they are not “Black enough,” which refers to both to an assumed privilege of lighter skin tones and a lack of familiarity with Black cultural norms. But the legacy of hypodescent excludes them from White communities. Speaking the language of your ancestors is often a barrier to belonging to the Latine or Middle Eastern communities. Multiracial people often report that they are not blank enough to fit in. Not only do people lose the solidarity of a community, but this kind of exclusion also leaves Multiracial people with nowhere to turn when facing racism, discrimination, and everyday microaggressions.

The nonprofit sector’s culture and language are all built upon the assumption that each person belongs to exactly one racial group. Fixing that doesn’t mean retiring the language; it means being explicit about who it includes. The language we use should be explicit about including Multiracial people. For example, a program serving “the Latine community” or a workplace affinity group organized around one racial identity should say so in writing, rather than leaving a Multiracial staff member or community member to guess and self-exclude.

The Bridging Opportunity

I used to think of belonging as knocking on a door waiting to be let in. john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, writes about belonging as the right to “cocreate the world.” This reframed the concept of belonging for me, after I had spent my whole life assuming belonging meant successfully assimilating into someone else’s system. It had never occurred to me that I could make demands on the system itself. It never occurred to me to say that the forms and norms need to change to include me and other Multiracial people.

For a long time, I described myself as half American and half Indian, a fraction of this and a fraction of that. Through reading and conversations with other Multiracial people, I no longer think of myself as a fraction of anything. Instead, I am a whole person who happens to hold multiple identities. Like all of us, I contain multitudes. With those multitudes comes the opportunity to bridge across identities. powell describes bridging as the practice of listening for another person’s story, their suffering and their aspirations, and notes that “bridging becomes more likely to occur if we can lean into the many identities we carry.”

Many Multiracial people name their mastery of code switching and the fluency of moving between worlds as their superpower. Some say it’s being a cultural chameleon. It’s a form of practiced bridging that movement-building and coalition work genuinely need more of. Multiracial staff, members, and community leaders often bring a connective, cross-group fluency. My own ability to toggle between Indian and American perspectives means I see how each society has different values, norms, and systems that result in different approaches to solving problems from traffic congestion to inequality. Being a cultural chameleon has honed my observation skills as I desperately tried to fit in and as I practice bridging more intentionally; it allows me greater empathy and understanding of different perspectives and worldviews. Fundamentally, gliding across very distinct cultures means there is never just one way to eat, dress, plan cities, provide health care, or build a culture of belonging. I’m not claiming Multiracial people hold some unique key to a post-racial world, or that this capacity is exclusive to us, but it is real, and it is currently invisible to a field that still mostly asks us to pick a side.

I recently came across a The New York Times interactive project called “How a Nation of Immigrants Traces Its Roots,” alongside a companion piece on how people in the United States understand their own identity through the census. We’ve been telling ourselves the melting pot story for over a century: the idea that all our different ancestries get poured into one pot and come out as a single, uniform American alloy. But that’s not what the map looks like. Zoom in anywhere and you don’t see one solid color. You see something closer to a watercolor painting: colors bleeding into each other, some pigments coming forward in one county, receding into the background in the next, nothing ever fully resolving into a single hue.

That is a better model than a checkbox for what the sector is trying to count, name, and organize around. The places where hues overlap are some of the most interesting parts of the painting and will only get more complex in the future. We need to stop assuming the picture will resolve into one solid color, and start building forms, language, and rooms that can hold the complex blends. The complexity was never the problem. Pretending it didn’t exist was.