Natalie Bishop was a little girl in Texas the first time she was asked to specify her race and ethnicity on an application. The daughter of a South Korean-born nurse and a white military veteran, she asked her mother what box to check on a form from school.
“My mom said check the ‘white’ box — it’ll give you more opportunities,” Ms. Bishop, a 38-year-old manufacturing engineer who now lives in Los Angeles, said with a laugh. But as she grew up, omitting the Asian half of herself felt wrong, she said, and even now, queries about her race still feel a little like trick questions.
“When the time comes for me to check a box,” she said, “I still ask: ‘What am I? What am I today?’”
Such questions have become more common as attempts by governments and institutions to capture the nation’s demographics have fallen out of sync with a population whose makeup increasingly defies longstanding labels.
Last week, racial identity and box-checking came up in New York, after Zohran Mamdani — the Democratic nominee for mayor, who is of Indian heritage and was born in Uganda — confirmed to The Times that, as a high school senior, he had identified himself on a Columbia University college application as “Asian” and “Black or African American” and also wrote in “Ugandan” on the form.
Some opponents sought to make political grist out of Mr. Mamdani’s choice on the form, pointing out that he is not Black and questioning whether he had tried to gain an unfair advantage in the university’s admissions process.
Mr. Mamdani, a state lawmaker from Queens who is a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda, denied trying to game the system and said he had simply sought to capture the complexities of his background. Both of his parents are Indian; his father’s family had lived in Uganda for decades, and Zohran Mamdani spent his early years there. The term African American has generally been used to describe Americans whose ancestors were from the Black racial groups of Africa.
Mr. Mamdani’s approach to identity boxes reflects experiences and decisions that have exasperated people across the country, according to many Americans who shared their stories in interviews and in replies to an online questionnaire from The New York Times that drew hundreds of responses.
Some complained that American institutions demand too much or too little or the wrong kind of racial and ethnic information. Some noted that other countries gather little data about race and wondered if, in the 21st century, such information even mattered.
“Race is a social construct that has outlived its time,” Will Shetterly, 69, wrote in the questionnaire. In a subsequent interview, Mr. Shetterly, a writer from Minneapolis who described himself as white, said that the nation’s more salient issue was rooted not in race, but in class.
The conversation comes as immigration and intermarriage have supercharged diversity in this country, according to the 2020 census. By the middle of this century, demographers have predicted, non-Hispanic white Americans will make up less than half the country’s population. Already, no ethnic population holds a majority in at least seven states — Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Maryland and Georgia. In 2000, there were three states where that was the case.
Roughly one in five newlyweds in the United States had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity in 2019, compared with 7 percent in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. A separate analysis by Pew found that one in seven infants in the United States was multiracial or multiethnic in 2015, nearly triple the share in 1980.
White, Black and Asian categories for race have confounded so many people of Hispanic origin — a fifth of the U.S. population — that the Biden administration proposed adding “Hispanic or Latino” to the racial options in the next census, rather than continuing to ask about the designation in a separate question about ethnic origin.
Another proposed change would add a new “Middle Eastern or North African” category for race, removing people of that heritage from a “white” designation that currently covers people from Irish Americans to Ashkenazi Jews. It is unclear whether the Trump administration will try to block the changes, which are well underway.
“We deal with this issue all the time,” said Yogesh Chavda, 57, a lecturer in marketing in Chicago, who sympathized with Mr. Mamdani. For years, he said, and through decades of American bureaucracy, he has routinely checked boxes marked “Asian,” feeling that “the way that the forms are built out, they don’t necessarily reflect who we are.”
“My father was born in Karachi,” he said. “I was born in Bahrain. My mom was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Both of them are Indian, and I grew up in an Indian household even though we were living in the Middle East.”
He became an American citizen during the first Trump administration, he said, but the blunt instruments of U.S. data collection remain a sometimes scary and sometimes humorous challenge. His wife, who also regards her heritage as Indian, grew up in Africa and then lived in Canada before they married, he said, and their son, now 18, was born in Venezuela. When the boy applied to colleges, Mr. Chavda said, “my wife and I were joking around that we should maybe select ‘Hispanic’ for him.”
Greg Bartkus, 60, who works in the film industry in Southern California, said ethnic categories had flummoxed him since his childhood. Raised in Michigan by a Lithuanian American father and a Mexican American mother, he said, he did not identify as Hispanic until he applied for college, on the advice of a consultant at a college fair.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “Until I moved to L.A., I didn’t know what the Day of the Dead was. My wife would just roll her eyes when I tried to order in a Mexican restaurant.” In the Midwest in the 1980s, he said, he was told he had minority status, but in California in 2025, “I’m just another 50-50 guy, nothing unique.”
Even the changes that have been proposed scarcely scratch the surface, said Keri Rogers, 34, an information technology manager in Houston who identifies as Black.
Mr. Rogers said he bristles at the lack of a special category for descendants of slaves, like him. Check boxes marked “African American or Black” can include people from all over the world across social classes, he noted, diluting the destructive legacy of American slavery.
“It’s borderline disrespectful, and it borders on ethnic erasure,” he said, calling Mr. Mamdani’s college application “a microcosm of a much bigger issue.” He added: “If someone who is, say, from Africa or the Caribbean or South America can come here and quote themselves into what was deemed to be our ethnic group forever, what does that make us? Who are we?
Katherine Sharp, 63, a retiree in Manhattan, expressed frustration with forms that broke out long lists of subcategories for other races — Haitian, Tongan — but lumped her Scandinavian and Sicilian heritage alike under a broad “white” checkoff. When she was pregnant, she said, she learned that Scandinavians face elevated genetic risks for diseases like cystic fibrosis. As a child, she was constantly instructed to eat her greens lest she succumb to “Mediterranean anemia.”
“White isn’t just white,” she said.
Still others charged that focusing on diversity, while a laudable goal, had turned race into a strategic tool in high-stakes venues like college admissions, and that as a college applicant in 2009, Mr. Mamdani would have been only prudent to deploy it. Mr. Mamdani said he had filled out his other college applications identifying himself as Asian and African American.
“My guess is he was gaming the system, but everybody’s gaming the system,” said John Kontrabecki, 73, a white lawyer in San Francisco with one child in high school and another in college.
“I’m a liberal Democrat,” he said. “I voted for Biden. I voted for Pelosi. But there are some things that Trump has called out that are accurate. We have created a system that’s easily manipulated by people to the disadvantage of people who are playing it straight.”
Philip N. Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland and a demographer who has advised the Census Bureau, said the shortcomings in classification have created “a mess.” Race has historically been an evolving and politically loaded concept, he said, but such data is also crucial to addressing longstanding inequities such as institutional racism and the legacy of slavery.
The data needs of governments and institutions are “always in tension” with the desires of respondents to reflect their unique backgrounds, he noted. “People approach forms and bureaucracies as individuals, and they want to be seen and heard and recognized.”
What struck him in the dust-up over Mr. Mamdani’s application was not that he had checked a box that, to some Americans, would have connoted a case for affirmative action, but that “he gave three answers to one question.” Doing so not only reflected the struggles of increasing numbers of census respondents but, he said, “was very much consistent with how young people look at things like this, especially idealistic young people.”
“They’re not likely to just play along with the statistical and bureaucratic game that doesn’t make them feel heard,” Professor Cohen said. “They’re really into the authenticity of their identities.”
That’s true, said Chad Corapi, 31, an engineer in Pasadena, Calif., who is “half Japanese, half white,” although the mostly Italian “white” side is actually “a bunch of European ethnicities.”
“I feel like we’re Americanized as a family,” he said. “But I just want to be accurate. I just don’t want to misrepresent myself.”
Ms. Bishop, the daughter of the South Korean-born nurse and the white veteran, said that she remembered struggling to fit in as a child in Houston with both her Korean cousins and the Texas side of her family. She knew that mixed-breed puppies were often given away, she said, “and I remember asking my mom, like: ‘Am I free? Am I not purebred? Do I not cost a lot?’”
Strangers struggle to place her ethnically, she said, mistaking her for Russian sometimes, or Hawaiian. Still, she said, she has come to embrace her whole background, particularly since she and her wife, Karlie Flores, 34, whose ancestry is white, Mexican American and Filipino, have begun considering starting a family.
There are questions, they said. How will their future children view themselves? How will their ethnic background affect their treatment? What background will they choose in their future donor?
“It’s a huge thing,” Ms. Bishop said. “What box we check.”
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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