A few friends posted this piece by Gina Crosley-Corcoranon, "Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person…".
This brings up a point I've been trying to make for a while: why "privilege" is the wrong word to describe the phenomenon of not being a victim of prejudice in a given situation.
There is no doubt that being a white guy means that there is some shit to which I am not subjected. My most recent vivid experience of the phenomenon: a cab will stop for me where it won't stop for an African-American man. That sucks. (And the African-American man in question was a much beloved local musician, a guy who can walk into any bar in the city and someone yell out his name and say how much they enjoyed one of his shows.)
But it's not a privilege to have a cab stop for me. It's the base level of treatment that every person should expect to be granted. Saying that "not having a cab ignore you is a privilege" is like saying "not getting shit thrown at you when you leave the house in the morning is a privilege".
I have real privileges. I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent free (tax-supported) education, to happen to have talents that are in demand in the present economy, to meet role models and mentors who have assisted me enormously, to come into the software field at the start of the dot-com boom, to be born into a close-knit family where I lived in waking distance of my grandparents. Those are privileges, things that could never be available to everyone. I try to be aware of them and "share the wealth".
And as an "white" male, I have exemptions from being victimized by some forms of the prejudice and bigotry in which our society marinates. I try (not always successfully, but I try) to be aware of these things, to scrub prejudice and bigotry from my own behavior and take action to remove them from our society.
(On the other hand as an atheist, a Pagan (not mutually exclusive!), a socialist (in the broadest sense of the term), and a polyamorous person, I've occasionally experienced prejudice. Nothing, thankfully, that's mattered much to me personally, but people have been seriously affected by these prejudices.)
And as a healthy and able-bodied person, I've been exempt from some negative consequences of poor system design. It's not a privilege to be able to walk, but it does means that I'm not directly affected when the folks designing a building forget that not everyone can and don't make things wheelchair accessible. I try to maintain awareness of that, and work for a world that is inclusive and accessible.
But using "privilege" to describe not being a victim of racism or sexism or "able-ism" (which is a controversy in itself but we'll leave that for another time), confounds these issues with the *real* privilege in our society: wealth and class, the on-going privatization of the world's resources.
"Privilege" literally means "private law". Fifty years ago, when women and people of color were literally legally bared from some places and activities, it was appropriate to use that word to describe the situation. But with equality the de jure (if certainly not de facto) state of affairs, it's now inaccurate.
The great legal inequality now, the private law of our time, is the manner in which the 1% control more and more of the planet's wealth. And telling a poor white guy that he's "privileged" only camouflages this state of affairs.