As I recall when Obama was first running for president, our papers described him as mixed-race till he made it clear he identified as black; Meghan Markle made that clear even before they were really reporting on her, I guess - even though she also straightens her hair and uses lighter-toned cosmetics? (Even pointing THAT out is sure to get me shot at, so I don my tin helmet and hasten to add, why shouldn't she?) One thing for sure, Americans don't really use the term "mixed-race" as we do in Britain -- they just say "black" and that may be infecting us along with all the other Americanisms.
There was an interesting article in the Times on Sept 19 that made me sit up, by a woman named Deborah Joseph, half-Iranian, half-German, who said she was angry at being identified as "white." As I am ethnically Syrian and have never thought of myself as anything but white, at first I was not only baffled but annoyed. (And I think carefully now about why "annoyed.") On those questions, if I don't just refuse to answer, I tick "British-Other" though now I think that through, presumably the fact that I now have a British passport isn't what they're asking about either. But what do they want to know, and why? I am very clearly not of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin, and am basically olive-skinned but also quite pale. I would think of it as "cultural appropriation" to describe myself as "of colour."
Surely simply having brown hair and brown eyes doesn't make you BAME? But what does make you BAME? What if your ancestry is from India the very definition of Aryan, and potentially anything from very light to very dark skinned? And what is "ethnic" anyway Swedishness is an ethnicity too, isn't it? Isn't "ethnic" just a cover for "race"?
The New York Times's Ethicist column on Oct. 13 had a letter from a Jewish person who asks why he should have to identify as "white" on questionnaires and census papers, when he feels like a minority too. The "Ethicist" told him to man up and admit he's white; it doesn't mean you're not also a victim of other forms of discrimination.
In the US I know there's this whole thing about "Hispanic," since that census grouping can include people of all skin tones and ethnic backgrounds too, from black-looking to white-looking via all sorts of native South American "Indian" (??? there's a term) backgrounds.
For me it helps that my two brothers married, in the one case, an Indonesian-Chinese woman, and in the other, an Argentinian woman with what looks like a lot of "Indian" features but also a Germanic, blue-eyed Argentinian father. Since I married a Brit, all three of us have ended up with one blue-eyed child out of two, making it clear that even on the Syrian side there is a blue-eyed gene. We like to joke that we as a family embody the concept of the United Nations.
Beyond that, I give up. But I also give you my hand, OP. Some day all this will be irrelevant.