Belonging, specifically, how a multiracial person forms a community, is a theme that Karabi Acharya’s debut book rigorously explores through interviews with several multiracial individuals.
Dr. Karabi Acharya’s nonfiction debut, Multitudes: The Multiracial Experience and How to Forge a Culture of Absolute Belonging (Apollo Publishers), is a book I’ve been waiting for all my life. The author’s life parallels my own. We were both born several years before the term “multiracial” was introduced in 1979. We are daughters of Hindu Indian fathers who benefited from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. We don’t speak our fathers’ languages. Our White-presenting mothers (Acharya’s mother has German and English ancestry; mine is Austrian and Puerto Rican) thought nothing of donning saris when the occasion required it. Acharya and I both came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in smaller U.S. cities that lacked racial diversity.
Neither one of us had multiracial role models in our youths. “There was not a single person in real or fictional life who was Multiracial, not a celebrity, not a politician, not an athlete,” writes Acharya, adding, “For many Multiracial people, the question about where we are from taps into one of our greatest fears: that we don’t belong anywhere.”
It wasn’t until the election of the 44th U.S. president, Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a White mother, that Acharya and I began to feel seen. The strengths (and there are many) in Acharya’s rich narrative lie in the passages about her family life and history. She spent most of her childhood in Carbondale, Illinois, where there was only one other Indian family. At age seven, her Bengali family relocated to Kolkata for two years, before eventually returning to the Midwest. She felt out of place everywhere, though—not quite Indian enough, and not quite American enough.
Vocabulary about identity spawns a dizzying array of confusing and oftentimes inaccurate terms. Acharya scrupulously explains her usage of “race,” “multiracial,” “monoracial,” “ethnicity,” and “nationality.” She defines “American” as “White American,” because “that is how it has manifested in my life,” and “it is the current norm.” While I concur that White supremacy continues to co-opt “American” identity, her decision to define it by whiteness makes me uneasy. It excludes, in particular, multiracial individuals whose Black and Indigenous families may have lived in the U.S. for several generations, and who are, arguably, more “American” than their non-Black or non-Indigenous family members.
What warranted a deeper dive in the book is a frank discussion about the complicity of multiracial people in advancing White supremacy and racist and colorist hierarchies. Multiracial people who either present or pass as White or possess lighter skin tones than their browner or blacker-skinned parents benefit from privilege. It is a choice, as a multiracial person, to either ignore this power dynamic, or to openly confront it. While reading Multitudes, I found myself wondering about the future of multiracialism. “Multiracial individuals are the fastest-growing demographic group in the country,” writes Acharya. “Between 2010 and 2020 the Multiracial population in the US grew from about 9 million people, or 2.9 percent of the total US population to about 33.8 million people, or 10.3 percent of the population.”
I find myself wondering where these multiracial people are in the Indian American community.
My multiracial adult children don’t seem to know that many more multiracial individuals than I do. What’s more, the vast majority of their fully Indian Gen Z peers exclusively date and marry other Indians. The taboo of partnering with people outside of the community seems as strong as ever. As a multiracial parent with multiracial children who are proudly connected to their Indian heritage, the lack of multiracial Indian families in our neck of the woods leaves me with some pretty complicated feelings.
I imagine this is something Acharya understands. As she so elegantly unspools in Multitudes, multiracial identity does not move in a straight line. It is an evolution, one that may start out with growing pains but will eventually transform into something more beautiful and rooted. Regardless, this wayward journey does not make us less valuable to our communities, nor does it detract from our distinct points of view. “We must own our narrative power,” writes Acharya, “and share our stories in all their glorious complexity.”
Atlanta-based Anjali Enjeti is the author of The Parted Earth, a novel, and two nonfiction books including Ballot.