Power and Privilege in the Cardenas Family

I have white skin.  So does my mother.  My father is a light brown color.  The sick joke in our family is that the reason he's been so successful (first to go to college; first with a master's degree) is because he's so light skinned.  My folks deliberately raised me away from the Cardenas center of the universe.  I grew up learning basic spanish pronunciations but not speaking the language.  Although we maintained a connection to the Latino community through an organization called the Latin Anglo Alliance, really, my parents made a deliberate choice to raise me as "white."  They did not want me to experience the kind of racism my father grew up with.   

So here I am, with my white (albeit tattooed) skin and gringa spanish, my college degree and my fancy-pants master's program.  My cousins, brown and bilingual, all know how to make tortillas.  They can live between two worlds.  My closest cousin, also Alicia Cardenas, is an entrepreneur and runs several successful businesses.  Who has power in our family?  Me with my $50,000 in loans, or my cousins who own their own homes?  My uncle who is a working, showing artist? Or me, with my liberal views concerning an anti-bias curriculum?  Me, who didn't know what it was like to be hungry until after college, who didn't know what it was like to be followed around in a store until my tattooed self moved back east for a few years?  Or my family who has, through their own versions of hard work, always had enough.  

I am not particularly interested in the question of who has more power in this situation, honestly.  In the microcosm of my family, it's clear to me that we bring our own funds of knowledge to the dinner table.  I cook Indian food; they make flan, and we can share and laugh.  I have no room to get on my high horse about my education, and they don't make fun of my college Spanish.  

I am using the example of my family to demonstrate the idea that power and privilege can be acknowledged, occasionally mitigated (as in the case of my parents deciding to raise me as an Anglo but making sure I was well aware of the choice and it's implications for issues of equality), and ultimately gotten over.  I refuse to be guilty because my Spanish ancestors raped my native grandmothers.  I refuse to be victimized because my grandmothers were raped by my Spanish grandfathers.  I refuse to be guilty because I was able to go to college.  Instead, I choose to shut up and listen to other kinds of power, privilege, and knowledge that people who are different from me have to teach.  

Perhaps, as Zalika pointed out, this is because I can just decide "oh, I don't want to deal with race today."  Perhaps it's because I want to acknowledge that there are great gaps in power and privilege in our society, get over the inequalities, and try and find equitable solutions while still honoring our differences.  Maybe it's because I believe in a world where we have to be constantly on guard against racism, but we can get past it.  It would be such a boring world if everyone were tattooed half-mexican cyclists like me...