Decolonizing Caste Mentality and Mixed Identity

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by Charhapiti
Published: 2026-04-16 (last update: 2026-04-19)
15-30 minutes

For people who struggle with not belonging, Communism has an answer.

How society sees multiracial people as a problem

Being multiracial is a political issue. Not just a personal one... And it's not a political issue in the way you might be thinking of it. Being multiracial carries oceans of unspoken pain, abuse, and shame which can take years to begin to articulate, often with few to no willing witnesses. These aren't just personal stories of feeling like an outsider. To begin, I'm going to first reject the framing of multiracial people as "mixed", which is a word that was imposed on us by colonizers in many languages and implies dilution, rupture, incompleteness, or contamination. And too often, various "mixed identities" have been essentialized and used to capture privilege rather than dismantle it.

A multiracial person of any racial composition might say:

You may have grown up in your village. But you don't know what it's like to be me in 'your' village. In a village that is in one way or another, mine too. You tell me that everybody just interrogates my existence because they all know each other, everybody knows each other... But they really don't all know each other, I know that. I know the truth. I'm not deluded. There is a difference between knowing and seeing appearances. You're just being weird and romanticizing. I don't know why you think that you can explain my experience. Because I know what it's like to be racially profiled. I'm from another village, and maybe I'm also from two other continents but ultimately I'm still from here. I'm still from this land. I'm still of this land. And I'm racially profiled. People think that I'm not from any place. You're romanticizing your own village, as if everyone is all united. That's a mask you put on because you see me as the eternal outsider because I look like a (fill-in-the blank) person who should be named '(fill-in-the-blank)', not an indigenous '(fill-in-the-blank)', and while admittedly aspects of me reveal that I am pretty foreign, I am also indigenous or 'from-here' in other ways. Yet when my relatives claim me as theirs, someone replies, 'what an abomination'. They interrogate me daily, I tell you, and you say that's normal with a tone of as if they almost should, even though I am embedded within our customs, did you not hear me when I said every conversation is an interrogation where they try to box me in to a fiction. You will never experience that. Do you not understand that when people ask the question 'where are you from' and do not accept the answer it's not ok, and I refuse to respond further, my answer is no, I won't make it easier for your to squeeze me into the fables of your mind. And somehow it's me who's tripping, not that they're racist.

This, more or less, is the universal experience of being multiracial. Not that it is the experience of all, but that it's the average. It could be happening in any continent. I write this to be intentionally general. I write this to expose how closely tied with ego and internalized colonialism it all is, rather than genuine defense of the people. It may seem difficult to understand how this ties back to purity fetishism, and that purity is not how people are defended against colonialism: after all, you want to preserve every last bit of the culture, you want maximum perfection. And there are these problematic foreign influences that seem to contradict that, so of course you oppose it.

Not everyone lives in a village today, but every human being at some point did live in a village, and most people still do, in fact today about half the world continues to live in villages. And the thinking is the same, and the multiracial identity conflicts have historically emerged from close-knit village contexts, not urban ones which are a further development of this social pattern. People tend to imagine that a village context is inherently more inclusive than an urban one, but it is not. It serves to highlight how deep the exclusion can run.

Okay, to compromise, let's assume maybe the multiracial person is the 'outsider' in some cases. Still, it doesn't mean anyone is right to treat multiracial people as categorical outsiders, in a metaphysical sense.

These implicit rules may sound familiar:

Born and raised: The idea that to be truly "from here," you must have been born there and never left (excluding those who left as children and later returned).
Grandparent from another place of the same ethnicity, who didn't pass the visual racial profiling test: Having even one grandparent from elsewhere who didn't fit a stereotype of being indigenous (even despite being monolingual native) disqualifies you, your children, and all descendants, indefinitely.
Phenotype / other-looking face: Someone whose face appears (white, Asian, African, or fill-in-the-blank other) is rejected as "not from here," even if their lineage goes back since the beginning of time from here. There might also be aspects such as hair, eye color, skin tone, etc, and any one of these can potentially mark one as an outsider.
Inverse phenotype test: People who fit the visual profile are accepted as 100% from here, even if they or their parents arrived from another location of the same ethnicity and settled recently. Their belonging is predicated not on being from a village of the same ethnicity, but rather on being able to pass the visual inspection. A person who was from a different village of the same ethnicity would still be excluded if they didn't pass the visual inspection. This highlights that visual inspection according to strict stereotypes is king.
Gender-conforming clothing: The requirement that women must dress in "our women's clothing" to be counted as from the village; dressing in men's clothing marks you as an outsider.
Inherited memory of non-passing appearance: Even if you pass the visual test today, people remember that a grandparent or great-grandparent didn't pass generations ago, and that memory excludes you permanently. However, even if they remember your grandparents or parents passed, if you today don't pass then you are excluded while they are included.

A certain way of thinking would say: well, maybe that stuff is unfair, but you (the visibly 'other' biracial, or triracial person) are the real foreigner so don't even think these matters pertain to you. Leave our village matters to us. There's no unity to be had between you and these other people listed.

To complete the picture, none of this happens to people who are genuinely outsiders from another country like Germany. To be a true outsider is to have privilege. The true outsider walks into the village, doesn't speak the language, doesn't wear the clothing, doesn't practice the traditions, has no ancestors in the soil... And what happens? Curiosity, maybe. Hospitality, likely. "Oh, a visitor from Germany! How interesting. Please, tell us about your country." No interrogation. Some men may feel "they get all the women", or something like that. Some people may feel unsure about their motives, or see them as an economic opportunity. But there's no "where are you really from" followed by rejection of the answer. No purity tests. No generational memory of wrongness. No one tells them to 'go back to where you came from'. The most positive reaction is towards white people. Non-white people and multiracial people who are genuine outsiders get less positive reactions.

A good portion of multiracial people never get to experience belonging in any place they are really from, and may be told or implied by all the places of their origin to 'go back to where they were from', which translates to literally nowhere. They may dream of the relief of going somewhere they are truly foreign and metropolitan, without the burden of trying to belong, some place that doesn't require you to have a certain racialized appearance in order to exist.

For the sake of argument I will characterize the system multiracial people are contending with as a caste system, because it usually is. Often these dynamics are embedded within real functioning caste systems or within the leftovers of such caste or apartheid systems imposed by colonialism.

The ones who are what we may as well call in-caste, they are likely to accuse these lower castes of enabling colonizing invaders like the multiracial people to come and despoil us. Instead of looking at the in-caste's own arbitrary rules, the problem becomes "disloyal lower castes." The threat isn't the system, it's the people who refuse to enforce it. If the lower castes believe they're "enabling invaders," they might stop defending the multiracial person, the perfect outsider-insider wildcard. They might turn on the multiracial person to prove their loyalty. The in-caste knows that solidarity between excluded people is the only real threat to their power. It romanticizes the past. "Before you came, we were united." Never mind that the lower castes were already being excluded, even if perhaps in minor ways. The in-caste rewrites history so that the arrival of the wildcard multiracial person is the rupture, not their own (potentially) centuries of exclusion. They borrow the words of actual anti-colonial struggle and aim them at the multiracial person who is simultaneously 'from here' and yet also foreign. It's really seen as a perversion to be multiracial yet belong. But it works on people who don't look closely.

Why do you suppose these people who are also excluded in more minor ways jump to a multiracial person's defense with their own stories of exclusion? Genuinely, this may be difficult for the multiracial person to understand why they empathize, because the multiracial person feels in the core of their being as a perpetual outsider, and they are looking at the person empathizing with them as an insider who is so much more deserving.

The fact is, when a lower-caste person defends the multiracial person, they're not enabling an invader. They're refusing to be the in-caste's weapon. They're recognizing that this fight and their fight are the same fight. And that terrifies the in-caste, because if the excluded stop fighting each other and start standing together, the whole hierarchy trembles.

I also think there is, for the 100% pure ones, an embarassment of being associated with the out casted. If one of them is too friendly with you, others might quietly demote them. Not officially, but in gossip, in invitations not extended, in the cold subtraction of belonging. The embarrassment is anticipatory shame: "What will the others think of me?" They're embarrassed of being mistaken for someone who doesn't understand the rules.

Every multiracial individual is a unity of opposites that people fail to imagine as anything other than contaminated or spoiled. There are also further dialectical nuances depending on WHAT your racial composition is, and the way the social material conditions interact with this.

Across Latin America, there is a long history of blanqueamiento, a social and political policy of "whitening" the population through mixing with Europeans, considered a path to progress. A clear example comes from a village on Mexico's Costa Chica region, where the primarily Afro-descendant community negotiates the national ideology of mestizaje, which often excludes or erases its African roots while valorizing its European and Indigenous heritage.
The U.S. "one-drop rule": It dictated that any person with any known African ancestry was classified as Black. This rule did not apply to people with Asian or European admixture in the same way. In fact, studies show that children of Asian-White couples are much more likely to identify as white than children of Black-White couples. There was also a period in time when any person from Latin America could self-identify as white, due to a legal loophole. The loophole was later tightened by adding more categories than 'black' or 'white'.
The ability to "pass" as white has historically been a way for individuals with multiracial ancestry to access privileges and escape caste-like discrimination. This phenomenon, documented in places like the antebellum US and Cuba, is almost exclusively an option for those with enough perceived 'European features' to be perceived as white, an option rarely available to those with visibly distinct African or Asian phenotypes.
Psychological studies on "hypodescent" (the rule of assigning multiracial people the status of their socially subordinate group) show that while it applies to both Asian-white and Black-white individuals, the perception can differ. Asian-white individuals are often categorized as "Asian," showing a visual bias that marks them as different from the white norm. The rule of hypodescent is applied more strongly to Black-white targets than to Asian-white targets. This shows that even within the logic of hypodescent, there is a tiered system where African ancestry is the most socially "sticky."
The existence of triracial communities (Melungeons, Lumbee, etc.) in the Appalachian and southeastern US illustrates this. These groups, often of European, African, and Native American descent, were historically seen as a separate "caste" and faced severe discrimination. Their "multiracial" appearance, which could include features read as "Asian" or "Indian," marked them as outsiders to the white-Black binary, and they often had to navigate a complex, caste-like social position.
The Siddis, an ethnic group in India and Pakistan descended from Bantu peoples from Southeast Africa, are a powerful example. Despite having been in India for centuries, they are often racialized and face caste-like discrimination due to their African phenotype. They are largely classified as a "Scheduled Tribe," a category for marginalized groups, highlighting the intersection of race and caste in their exclusion.
The experience of multiracial people in Japan is shaped by a long-standing ideology of racial purity. From the late 19th century onward, the concept of "pure blood" (junketsu) was promoted as a defining characteristic of the Yamato people, contrasted with "mixed blood" (konketsu), a term that carried significant stigma. This ideology was institutionalized during the imperial era, with the government using the label konketsuji ("mixed-blood child") to create a racialized hierarchy that positioned multiracial children as a social problem. The language used to describe multiracial people in Japan has evolved over time, but the underlying exclusion has remained constant. Crucially, this exclusion is not applied uniformly. There is a clear hierarchy based on the racial background of the non-Japanese parent. Research shows that "non-White visible minority Hāfu": those of African, Latinx, or South Asian descent, face a particularly harsh reality, as their foreignness is constantly reinforced by their phenotype. For instance, "Black hāfu" are often subjected to overt verbal racial discrimination, such as being called "gaijin" (foreigner), "black monkeys," or being told to "go back to your country". For Black-Japanese people, this exclusion takes a particularly insidious form. Professor Marvin Sterling's research describes their experience as a "hyperinvisibility" a state where their Black-Japanese identity is simultaneously highly visible and socially erased. As Sterling argues, this hyperinvisibility reflects and reproduces a "broader displacement of race in Japanese public discourse," where the myth of a homogeneous society silences any discussion of racially diverse reality.
There are peoples who are perceived as foreigners in their own country who are not granted citizenship for generations or hundreds of years. Foremost among these are the Roma. They also include Banyarwanda of Uganda, Bidoon (Bedoon) in Kuwait, Chinese (Karana) in Madagascar, Dalits in Nepal, Madheshis in Nepal, Makonde in Kenya, Nubians in Kenya, Pemba in Kenya, Rohingya in Myanmar, Shona in Kenya, Somali Bantu in Kenya, Twa (Batwa) in Central Africa, Waata Oromo in Kenya, Coastal Arabs in Kenya, Galje'el in Kenya, Biharis (Urdu-speaking) in Bangladesh, Chinese Indonesians, Hill Country (Indian) Tamils in Sri Lanka, Hmong in Thailand, Papuans in Indonesia, Muslims of Indo-Pakistani origin in Madagascar, Japanese Descendants in the Philippines, descendants of Hungarians who married foreigners (especially if the Hungarian was a woman before 1957), Ainu in Japan, Burakumin (Hisabetsu Buraku) in Japan, and Okinawans (Ryukyuans) in Japan. But there are certainly many more not mentioned.
In countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, people of multiracial European and African descent were classified as "Coloured," a distinct and subordinate racial category. They were neither "white" nor "native" African and occupied a precarious middle position, often facing discrimination and social exclusion from both groups. This categorization enforced a rigid hierarchy based on the degree of African "blood." Under apartheid, Coloured people had legal privilege relative to Black Africans (better housing, some political representation, slightly more mobility). Yet Coloured people also experienced racial marginalization from Black Africans (social exclusion, distrust, sometimes violence). So how can someone be both "privileged" and "marginalized"? Because Coloured "privilege" wasn't really power, it was a buffer zone.

Let's focus on the way Africa handled this. The Black Consciousness Movement explicitly tried to unite Coloured and Black Africans under "Black" identity. Apartheid spent decades drawing microscopic lines between "native," "coloured," "Asian," "other." The Black Consciousness Movement said: we don't accept your ruler. We are one people. Suddenly, the buffer zone disappears. The pyramid becomes a single floor. This was important because the system that pits the middle against the bottom is one that keeps the top level safe. "Black" identity, in Biko's vision, wasn't about skin tone alone, it was about shared oppression under white supremacy. That included Coloured, Indian, and Black African people. (Asians? Yes there were in fact, many Asian Africans. Being part Chinese or Indian placed you inferior, but being part Japanese made you 'honorary white'.)

Being called "non-white" or "mixed" or "lesser" becomes, under Black Consciousness, a badge of resistance. You're not less than anything. You're Black, and Black is beautiful, Black is strong, Black is united.

Why did they not choose to half-embrace and police multiracial people as a decolonial answer? Because dear reader, think about the consequences of only half embracing your multiracial community members. Many have already experienced such consequences. Does it result in better protection of communities? No, that's a myth. If it were true, then ethnicities like the Roma and Arabs and many others would have gone into extinction. Does it reduce your people's inherited genetic memory? Not even close. What does happen, instead, is that you forget that we are all one, human beings. What does happen, is that when you ask a native child "what is identity, what is culture, what is ethnicity?" all they can do is point to phenotypical facial features, to racial stereotypes. What does happen, is that the multiracial people live lives of self-hatred and imposter syndrome and spiritual illness, behavioral problems, issues making or keeping relationships, susceptibility to being manipulated and abused by those they consider 'better than' or 'more deserving' than them, suicidality, inability to look into the mirror without being triggered, and an existential lostness. It's not being multiracial that causes this, it's the stigma against being multiracial that does. What does happen, with this stigma, is that multiracial people attack and abuse each other because of their own insecurities. What does happen, with this stigma, is that multiracial people have no one to talk to. What does happen, with this ignorance, is that people call them "mutts", likening them to stray animals. What does happen, is that more 'pure blood' people can get away with disloyalty, perhaps even bragging about how westernized they are, and never have to face the threat of exclusion.

So what did you really accomplish by excluding or diminishing them? You created a broken people. And Black identity and Black consciousness was never about creating broken people, quite the opposite.

The Communist answer

The Black Consciousness movement provided a model, and traditional cultures all over the world that have kept their ancient ways also provide a model. Generations of conditioning don't vanish overnight, however, and in order to make the transformation stick it must be paired with elimination of material inequality. The only way to eliminate material inequality is socialism: Marxist Leninist, Jucheist, Communist socialism. The one that eliminates the class system.

Biko himself wrote extensively about economic liberation alongside psychological liberation.

The material base determines the ideological superstructure in the final instance, as the Marxist saying goes. But Juche adds that socio-historical processes, including ideological ones like racial hierarchy, purity tests, and caste memory, develop their own relative autonomy and their own internal laws. You can't just wait for the base to change and assume everything else follows mechanically.

In our case:

The material base (colonialism shaping land ownership, inheritance, class relations) created the conditions for the purity tests to emerge.
But those purity tests have since developed a life of their own. The memory of a great-grandparent's face. The hierarchy of which admixture is "worse." The way a white German is welcomed while others are interrogated. These are not reducible in any simple or immediate way to who owns the means of production.
They have their own momentum, their own logic, their own capacity to persist even if the material base were radically transformed.

A Marxist-Leninist revolution that only changes ownership of land and means of production will not automatically eliminate the village's racial caste system. The socio-historical processes of exclusion: the interrogations, the clothing rules, the inherited memory of non-passing faces, must be contended with directly. As their own front of struggle. With their own analysis, their own strategies, their own timeline.

Juche, with its emphasis on self-reliance, subjectivity, the active role of human consciousness in shaping history, provides a foundation for this work. The subject of revolution is not just a passive product of material conditions but an active force that must take on all the chains: economic, racial, gendered, caste-based, simultaneously and with full awareness that each has its own laws of motion.

I'm not a crude "economic determinist", as liberals would claim. I'm saying: the material is primary in the end, but the ideological has developed such powerful independent momentum that it must be fought on its own terms, with its own methods, as part of the same revolutionary process. Not after the revolution, but within it.

A decolonized identity

There are actions we can take right now to decolonize our minds before we even get to the point of revolution.

Maybe you're reading this and say, well, we don't have this problem. Maybe your family simply responds to multiracial discrimination with 'don't listen those mean people!' But that doesn't provide an elaborate theory which would obliterate the aforementioned bourgeois ideology from the planet. That's why, in reflecting on the actual lived practices of many ethnicities around the world who are not caught up in legalistic systems nor colonialism, a pattern emerges: ethnic groups have always absorbed outsiders through cultural and relational means, not genetic accounting. Genetic accounting is a more modern development, rooted in colonialism, racism, and dispossession.

If a family of a particular ethnicity (or maybe blended ethnicity, such as Afro-indigenous) marry a white person who adopts their customs completely and doesn't pass down anything of her own, then she's as much a part of them as anyone else (provided she remains with them), and the children are 100%. And if one of those children marry a European (like an Irish person) who has no connection to her culture and just goes along with things, then those children are 100% provided the family network instilled the culture.

Romanichal people are a perfect example of why blood quantum is incoherent. Centuries of intermarriage in Britain has caused Romanichal to often have no distinct "genetic markers" separating them from the general British population, and no genetic remnants from their ancient origins in India. Yet they are recognized as an ethnic group under UK law (e.g., Commission for Racial Equality v. Dutton), with their own history, language (Angloromani), customs, and lived experience of anti-Romani racism. Their identity has never depended on genetic purity. But the Romanichal are only one example of how this works, and there are easily countless other examples around the world.

In much of the part of Abya Yala people call "Latin America", Indigenous identity has historically operated through community belonging, cargos (civic-religious roles), kinship networks, language use, and reciprocal labor obligations, not through blood quantum or legally documented descent from colonial-era rolls (which is a uniquely U.S./Canadian imposition tied to treaty rights and federal recognition by a settler colonial state, in other world it is colonized). The imposition of racial caste systems is a colonial development.

In Arabic countries of West Asia, to be Arab is a cultural matter, not a racial matter, and being multiracial is not seen as something especially abnormal. In fact, nationalist modern movements of the 20th century (such as the Ba'athists) have only recently begun to preach racial purity, introducing stigma about being multiracial. But such reactionaries are quickly put in their place when you ask them about the multiracial and multiethnic identities of so many of the Islamic prophets. I had my Arab comrades read this essay and they laughed out loud at the bizarre rules of exclusion practiced upon multiracial people and people who aren't multiracial but who don't "pass visual inspection".

The list goes on and on.

Even the very idea of being "multiracial" is problematic, because race is a social construct. The problem is people believe race is real, and behave as though it is. They associate race with biology. In the real practice of society and daily interaction, race never operates according to biological processes, rather it operates according to its own socio-historical processes. And in the real practice of biological life, such as human mate selection, biology never operates according to race, not even by the ideologically minded humans who preach their racial purity dogma. There is no animal in the world which pays any mind to notions of race. Only in human society where we divide each other up according to who is more or less deserving, does race get introduced. So where does that leave us except with a hopeless racial ideology that collapses on itself the moment it interacts with the real world? What, other than despair and defeat, can such ideology bring? Race is not real, and we know it was historically invented in the modern era. In 99.9% of human existence, the concept of race did not exist. Some say it was invented in 1620 with the coining of "black" and "white" races. Whenever it was invented, it was never the means by which human society organized itself, but it was always the means by which human society betrayed natural law and the oneness we have with all living things. Humans have always come in many colors, but they have never come divided by races.

The decolonized stance is to see multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural people, and two-spirit and gender diverse people too, as a 'bridge' between worlds. They are not less than. They are multitudes. They strengthen cultures, they do not weaken them. They bring the very genetic diversity that is needed to avoid the diseases of inbreeding. They may bring creative perspectives that breathe new life into old traditions, rather than mediocrity. What capitalism doesn't want us to see is the power of multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic people's diversity to unite humanity across experiences through their lived understanding.

Stand up, multiracial people! Embrace your diverse selves! Abolish race!