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I always thought of identity as mostly imposed anyway. You don’t really get to pick. What my race, class, religion (unless I specifically rejected it and make a declaration of it) and social class are not things that one chooses for oneself but things that through interactions with society you’re taught. Especially if you’re visually distinct, as minority groups tend to be, the wider society doesn’t exactly let you ignore it. A black person is black no matter what because we’ve somehow decided that black and Hispanic and Native and Indian ancestry makes you not white.
I’m not personally in favor of Bipoc simply because it sort of implies that every person of color has an identical experience— that the Chinese students in California have the same experience as the Latino in Arizona, the Native in Wyoming, or the black in Chicago. It’s a political term, more or less, much like LGBT is; meant to unite the people in those groups into a polity for the purpose of gaining power and rights in American electoral politics. But I think for me at least in nonpolitical conversation, it’s much more useful to consider the needs of any groups individually, and to consider the person you’re talking about as a specific type of bipoc within the whole.
Currently we've decided that Hispanic ancestry is orthogonal to white ... and for that matter I'm not sure we demand an ancestry component to that ethnicity. Many people with 75% native Mesoamerican ancestry are still universally accepted as part of an ethnicity named after the Hispania region of Europe, on the basis that the assimilation into the culture descended from that region is more important than the genes from that region. If someone with 100% native ancestry is equally assimilated and self-identifies as Hispanic, would anyone really argue it?
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