Raquel Reichard by

While terms like “Latino” and “Hispanic” aim to lump people of Latin American and Spanish Caribbean descent together, many of us are of different racial, national, language, cultural and historical identities, meaning that despite the fact that we all check "Latino" on forms and surveys, our experiences as Latinos in the U.S. are not identical to one another – for some of us, there are actually more differences than similarities.

Case in point: the privileges that light-skinned Latinos possess that most Indigenous and African descended Latinos don’t. Colorism is a principal and a practice that treats light, fairer-skinned people better than those with darker hues, and it's upheld both between and within communities of color. In the Latino community that looks like light-skinned Hispanics, who may deal with different forms of anti-Latino racisms, receiving preferential treatment in school, the workplace and politics.

We live in a culture that values whiteness, so the closer we meet this ideal, the more privileges many of us attain. That doesn’t mean that the race, immigration and class struggles of light-skinned Latinos aren’t real – far from it – but it does mean that light-skinned Latinos are awarded a set of unearned privileges that many darker members of the Latino community don’t enjoy. Here are a few:

MORE: 7 Problematic Convos About Race Your Latino Family Has Probably Had