It’s Time for Mixed and Multiracial People to Speak Up About What It’s Really Like Living In-Between
By Namalee Bolle. Pre-order her book, The Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing, here.
One of the most challenging things about writing my book, The Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing: Navigating Family, Identity + Healing, was learning to break free from the monoracial rules and regulations that I still held inside me, whilst trying to write candidly about our missing narrative.
‘Will monoracial people question why mixed and multiracial people need to heal?’ Boomed the voice in my head.
‘Am I too privileged to speak up about this?’
’Will they make me question myself or ask me to justify my multiracial integrity?’
The voice continued: ‘Is asking ‘What arrrrreee you?’ really an issue, or am I being dramatic?’
I felt exhausted at just how much I second-guessed myself.
I really wanted to open up new in-depth conversations for mixed and multiracial people, but my anxiety around voicing this reflected the weight of our silent complicity with the monoracial status quo. Like many of us I have also internalised unhelpful scripts about not being whole and split myself into parts and fractions on my journey. Squishing my racially non-binary self into an easily categorised more palatable one, was something I had now began to question, but I still found myself mono-policing my own pen!
With support from friends, community and JKP, I was encouraged to ‘push through the mono-resistance’ and finally, I got there! I’m not denying the positives about being mixed, it’s just that our appearance and how we look to others is often hyper emphasised for our group. My whole life I have heard mixed and multiracial people repeat conventional, people pleasing narratives about ourselves: saying things like ‘I’m so lucky to be mixed’ which may well be true on one level, but overly relying on that singular narrative, also totally erases a whole other part of our identity where, for many of us, it can be pretty tough to be mixed as well.
Innocently parroting what has been dictated to us by family and society about an experience that only we can understand, doesn’t speak to the full breadth of what we actually do go through. We embody so much more than reductive stereotypes of being ‘exotic’ and we deserve conversations that delve further into understanding ourselves beneath the surface.
Whilst it’s true that some mixed people do have skin privilege, this is juxtaposed with the distinct psychological challenge of being racially non-binary that more often than not goes unseen in a monoracially focused society. My book aims to open up insight into this dialogue, to provide prompts, language, helpful tools and deeper understanding into our multiplicity and complexity, not only for mixed people ourselves but also for friends, family members, therapists and colleagues and those who would also like to support us.
Namalee Bolle is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, transpersonal transcultural integrative psychotherapist and award winning writer. She is British born of Sri-Lankan and Dutch-Jewish heritage and her work explores themes of multicultural identity, intergenerational trauma and post-traumatic thriving.With a background as a fashion editor and magazine co-founder Namalee was featured in Pioneers: A Renaissance in South Asian Creativity at the British Maritime Museum. Her work has been published in The Guardian, I-D, Dazed,The London Evening Standard, Vogue and ShowSTUDIO.
The Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing is out on 19th February 2026 and available to pre-order now.