I remember the day I submitted my UCAS form. I was four cups of coffee in at 1am. Blood thundered in my ears as I checked my personal statement for the sixteenth time, made sure I didn’t almost apply to Oxford (which, by the way, I almost did) and checked through all the minutiae of every detail of my life. In this panicked scanning, I paused for the briefest second over one of those tiny tick boxes. It was asking me about my race. I doubted myself for a moment before quickly clicking ‘White’ and moving on. But that was not technically accurate.

“I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t live in a Latinx community. My connection to my heritage seemed superficial at best.”

My father is Brazilian, you see, and therefore I am Latina. The logic behind my choice not to use this label seemed clear to me at the time. I hadn’t experienced any of the discrimination or prejudice that Latinx people face every day. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t live in a Latinx community. My connection to my heritage seemed superficial at best.

Especially when in the United States – which I consider one of my home countries – a man had launched his campaign for the presidency in a series of racial tirades against the very group I was supposedly part of. If Donald Trump met me, he would not have felt inclined to make the same sort of comments he made about Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe winner who was Latina; he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’. I felt I would be gaining a dispensation which I did not deserve, having never been subject to any of the discrimination associated with being Latina in America and at home, in the UK.

But I did have – as extremely awkward and ultra-private as it was – a quinceañera, the traditional celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday. English is my father’s third language. But, most importantly, I am half Brazilian. My father’s family is from the northeast, clustered in a few cities on the coast. My family visit Brazil as often as we can and have a large and lively extended Brazilian family.

So why did I consider myself white? Well, I look white. If you had just met me, you would assume that I was just another Scottish-Irish-English hybrid, like many of the people who look just like me. Therefore, I feel I have lived in a white privilege that I am not technically entitled to.

The question they were essentially asking me on that form was the wrong one: did I feel like I had faced discrimination because I was Latina? The answer to that question is clearly no. But does that mean I am not Latina? Well, the answer to that is also no. It does not seem to adequately allow for the complexity of race and privilege. For example, simply ticking ‘black’ does not account for light skin privilege. It is odd that race is defined by discrimination by the universities to which we are applying.

Indeed, most of my privilege stems from the fact that I am wealthy and upper middle-class. The opportunities and legs-up I have had were much more to do with my wealth than my perceived whiteness, but it still made me uncomfortable about taking up the label ‘Latina’, a label associated with under-privilege. To be clear, I was not ashamed to be Latina, I just felt like I had not experienced the discrimination to deserve the classification. In this context, being wealthy and privately educated made me feel less Latina.

Instead, we should be asking whether we feel we have been discriminated against because of our ethnicity. We should inquire after the person’s personal experience, rather than that of a wider racial group, which are occupied by people of many levels of privilege. This is particularly true in America, which is unquestionably still grappling with an urgent crisis of race. I think my struggle over my classification was a uniquely American one; race is so important across the pond – in society and in university admissions – that my Latina label seemed particularly unfair.

This is not to say that British minorities do not face serious disadvantages. You only have to look at the viral picture of the 2015 Cambridge intake of young black men: there were 15 admitted across the university. However, most of the discrimination and disadvantages in our country are much more linked to class than to race. It really astonishing to someone who was brought up in an American mindset; I’ve seen class-tensions and clashes play out in friendship groups here at university.

What your accent sounds like, what school you went to, whether you are from the south or the north – these have been the questions that matter in our bubble. I watched some of my friends’ accents get less pronounced as our first year went by, driven by embarrassment and the desire to fit into the status quo of the southern, private school accent that dominates almost every Cambridge space.

The UCAS form is a blunt instrument: it was not designed to capture the nuances and complexities that make us who we are. But, by asking what race we are rather than inquiring after the discrimination we have faced, I think the university is working with the wrong information in analysing who we are and what we have been through