I used to work with a mixed race guy who considered himself to be white. When I felt comfortable enough to ask, I asked why he chose white over black.
He said it was because he was raised to not expect anything handed to him and didn’t want to live with the question of whether affirmative action was the source of his success.
I spend much of my childhood in what the revisionists derisively call the old plantation belt, with a large rural black population. Curious thing was, many if not most of the black folks were as white or whiter (meaning in physical appearance) than the folks who were “white” officially. In such an environment, you either learn to never assume anything racial about anyone, or you get very good at telling who is what.
The most unusual thing of all this that I noticed, is that the most virulently anti-black white people I was aware of back then, looked to have had some black ancestry themselves, and the descendants of the old plantation families were the most open to befriending black students. Not that the empathy was necessarily returned, however, especially if they shared a surname.
And, memories are very long and very spiteful, between house and field. There is a family, with a surname prominent in the Obama administration, that still catches flak, for helping hide the silver, etcetera, back at the bitter end of the war when Union troops finally pillaged their way through this part of the south, still called Toms because of it. Very distinctive looking people, very fair, often with green eyes. And, they’re still hated for it by the darker folks.
It was quite a minefield to negotiate, especially in a high school that hadn’t been desegregated for more than a decade at the time.