I am a full-blooded Latina, who happened to be raised in an affluent and mostly white community. I can pass for many races (I’ve gotten everything from “Dark” Italian to Egyptian to Arabic, even though my ancestry traces mostly to the native peoples of the Caribbean), and so I have only rarely suffered any sort of racism related to being a Latina. I’ve even been rewarded for my heritage, because most Hispanic scholarships are merit-based, and I’m intelligent and was raised privileged enough to excel in school; I even had Ivy League schools show interest in me (and I know my ethnicity was taken into consideration there, because my white peers received no such letters).
My point is that I might as well have white-privilege – I’ve identified more with the “privileged white culture” all my life, after all. I’ve joked about being “the whitest Latina in the world” and I’ve identified with white heroes in television and books and movies and had no real problem that there weren’t any Latina heroes that looked like me.
A few months ago, I stumbled upon the character of Miss America, from Marvel’s Young Avengers, and everything changed.