OB's description of white privilege above is spot on.
Look, I have had feelings in the past related to feeling like being white was a disadvantage. I remember very well applying to law schools and receiving a very high score on my LSATs. A roommate of mine, who happened to be a second generation immigrant of North African descent, received an identical LSAT score. We went to the same high-end private college, we had the same standardized test scores, we had nearly identical GPAs (I think he was .02 higher, which is essentially one letter grade in a single class over four years) and we were even in the same major. Long story short: He went to Harvard, I went to Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt is a very good school, but Harvard is Harvard. At 20 years old, I distinctly remember feeling that this was unfair. I even spent significant amounts of time trolling websites like lawschoolnumbers.com and entering the user provided data into excel spreadsheets so that I could do regression analysis on various schools to determine just how many LSAT points various schools impliedly "gave" you for being a minority (if you're curious, the numbers were large except at UNC-Chapel Hill, where it was actually a disadvantage). The point here is that I went deep on this issue.
My old roommate has had a wonderful career, he's even worked for the NBAPA and is one of my sources for inside the league gossip. But the guy had a hell of a time in Boston and dealt with more police incidents in three years than I or anyone in my family have dealt with during their entire lives combined. I know he's just a regular guy, but for some reason he kept getting stopped, searched, questioned, etc. In speaking with him, it became apparent that these problems persisted basically everywhere he lived that wasn't his original college in suburban Atlanta. I've also gotten acquainted over time with his family situation and seen how, honestly, everything is just harder when you're an immigrant and a minority.
Ten years down the line, I can honestly say that he deserved it and I didn't. It's questionable whether I even deserved to go to Vanderbilt. In some sense, I always treated a good education as my birthright, and lo and behold it happened despite virtually every decision I made that could have derailed it. The assumption was always that everything was going to work out. That's a thing I recognize that I could get away with because there weren't any structural obstacles for me personally.
Understanding white privilege, in some respect, requires trying to conceptualize what your life would have been like under totally different circumstances. It's an exercise in empathy, and I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't capable of that at 18, 19, 20 years old. I spent a lot of time in the intervening years involved in a charity educational program in inner city schools in Atlanta and Nashville. Those schools were primarily poor and black. That was my period of time spent even observing other people dealing with their own structural burdens, even at the basic level of feeling like school for them was handled as if it was child prison. The assumption was never that these kids would succeed. As a result, yes I find it patently offensive when people complain about some level of reverse racism. I see the evil in myself from a decade ago examining a single data point that measured a solitary result and acting like there is some equivalence versus and entire lifetime and pre-lifetime of systemic harm. It's like trying to learn to swim when someone keeps pushing you under. Telling that aquatic violence victim that learning to swim sucks because you keep getting water up your nose is bound to induce rage.
This got overlong, rambly and kind of personal, sorry about that. I'll go back to work now. Everyone should stop being racist.
![[size/HUGE] fixed [/size]](/data/avatars/m/2/2497.jpg?1511131091){kind=avatar}
