I don't know how to handle the term "mixed"

Specifically in the context of persons who usually are not close to me in any way who feel the need to ask me,

"Are you mixed?"

or are so audacious as to presume a mixed racial background and bust right out with,

"What are you mixed with?" 

I'm sincerely unsure whether the sirs and madams who ask these questions understand how problematic they are. 

First off, dogs are mixed. I am not mixed. Nor am I a mulatto, a mudblood, a mutt, a half-breed, a quadroon, or an octaroon. (Click here if you're confused by any of these names.) If you phrased the question as, "Do you come from a multiracial background?" I suppose that the truthful answer is yes. If you were to move backwards through my family tree, you would discover multiple people of non-African descent. At the very least, you would discover German, Portuguese, and American-Indian ancestry. There's a good chance you'd find some White guy from Canada in the not too distant past (my dad's dad's dad), though I don't know for a fact that this person was White or what his nationality was, and will never know because no one living knows. No matter which side you go up or what branches you go off exploring, all over my family tree you will run into question marks. Things no one knows and no one can know. 

So, am I mixed? Technically, yes, I suppose. Historically speaking. Not recently. Not primarily through choice. I only know that the German (my dad's mom's mom) was an un-forced mixture. Thus I will claim that, if pressured, but I feel no obligation to recognize small percentages of my racial make-up formed through slavery, oppression, or other relations I am not sure were consensual. I feel especially unobligated to do so because the overwhelming majority of multigenerational African-Americans--Imani Perry's term for those of us who descended from slaves--share a similar history. Rather ironically, Blackness constitutes "otherness" to White America, while simultaneously containing Whiteness nearly definitionally. The question marks in my family tree are a trademark of life as a descendant of an enslaved population: if you wanted to say that the only Black persons allowed to identify as such are those with nary a White face on their family tree, the only Black people in America would be recent African immigrants. My mom's mom's mom was a dark-skinned woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. This is our history. So to those people who claim that I'm doing a disservice to American history and my ancestors' legacies by not identifying as multiracial, I say that you're doing the same disservice to American history and adding injury to current Black populations by not allowing us to incorporate our complicated racial histories into one story of preservation, rather than of domination and dissipation.

Am I mixed? Technically, yes, I suppose. Historically speaking. Not recently. Not primarily through choice. But I will never ever check that on a box. I will never say this of myself. I identify as a Black person. I interpret my Blackness as inherently containing elements that aren't Black, and I would appreciate it if you, people who question my monoracial identity, would accept my interpretation. How dare you seem incredulous when I respond that I'm "just Black"? How dare you try to say, "No you must be ________"? You don't know me like that, and I am allowed to identify however I please. If I screw up your schema of what a "just Black" person "should" look like (or act like or feel like or be like), then well, I'm not sorry. 


Also, my friend @iribobiri came up with the best response ever to the second question. I promise this will play out in my life at least once:

Ignorant person I've recently met: What are you mixed with?

Me: A wire whisk.