Suggesting that there is something contrived about a mixed-race person identifying as Black assumes that the choice wasn’t already made for her.

With the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans were determined to maintain the architecture of white supremacy and the exclusive white rights it entailed, even as the pervasive rape and sexual coercion of enslaved Black women had produced large numbers of Black Americans with European ancestry. So as white Americans passed apartheid laws to keep millions of newly freed Black people from political, social and economic equality, they also had to pass laws to determine who would be considered white and could therefore enjoy the spoils of the constructed racial hierarchy.