[hn_throwaway_99]

Consider this:

Who do you think is more privileged, with "privileged" meaning access to money, support, opportunities and potential for advancement: Will Smith's kids or a white poor guy who grew up in West Virginia?

I think the point the parent is trying to make is that at any individual's level income and wealth are a far better measure of privilege than race. Yes, wealth is highly correlated with race in the US, and a lot of that has to do with legally enforced racist policies in our past. And there are also certainly some examples of privilege that do correlate more with race than income (e.g. racial profiling by law enforcement). But if your headline is "Gap between rich and poor Americans...", why not just focus on those who are actually rich and those who are actually poor.

[DanBC]

> Who do you think is more privileged, with "privileged" meaning access to money, support, opportunities and potential for advancement: Will Smith's kids or a white poor guy who grew up in West Virginia?

This is a misunderstanding of privilege.

You don't compare Smith to poor people in West Virginia, you compare him to his Hollywood peers. And there are fewer roles for black men, so yes, he is less privileged than his peers.

For poor white people the situation is more complex but anyone providing services knows that poor white men face significant disadvantages across a range of indicators and they're trying to fix it.

[opnitro]

Yes, there are white people are poorer than Will Smith. Unfortunately, if we want to do analysis of society at large, we need to look at trends. And leaving race out of class analysis tends to obscure some of the relationships at play. This is because class and our notions of race are forever entangled, not least of all because we are society predicated upon slave labor.

[save_ferris]

Doesn't the "most privileged group" moniker applied in the quote that parent chose to argue against do exactly what you suggest: focusing on those who are rich without race?

Parent chose to explicitly label the most privileged group as white men before arguing that white men aren't actually the most privileged group, when they are in most conceivable metrics.