All of this, Daughter! Every.Single.Word!

A couple years ago, my Italian husband's niece invited us to her "destination wedding" at a plantation in my home town of Charleston, SC. Needless to say, we didn't go -- as my husband told her EXACTLY what you said above when she called to find out why we hadn't R.S.V.P.'d positively.

Italians became white once they got here, as Mr. James Baldwin so eloquently explains here: https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf -- "...There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank ofthe Holy Ghost and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become "white." No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country."

So, while J-Lo may claim Latina when it's expedient -- she TOO has "paid the price of the ticket." {SMDH,...}