[fiblye]

This kind of "logic" really bothers me.

Just because a chunk of a certain demographic is comparatively "privileged", we should gloss over all those who struggle to make a living simply because they were born a white male? If anything, being born poor and white can be more difficult because people bitch about your "privilege" each time you ask for the slightest degree of help.

If you're poor and white, you're pretty much screwed when it comes to being able to afford colleges. Most scholarships serve people that belong to a certain (non-white) race, religious, or military background. You don't get access to any tutoring and you're usually working after school to help support your family, so it's borderline impossible to get a 4.0 GPA and even begin qualifying for non-racial scholarships.

Outside of racial profiling within America's law enforcement (which is a huge, huge, huge problem that desperately needs to be fixed), there's really no "white privilege" in America. It's "high-income privilege." Anybody born of a wealthy family has a chance, and anybody who isn't suffers. The problem is that we're still looking at race when determining how much support to offer instead of looking at how much a person needs it.

[wpietri]

> Outside of racial profiling within America's law enforcement [...] there's really no "white privilege" in America.

Spoken like a white person. As a fellow white person, let me tell you: you're wrong.

Some years back I shaved my head for a year or so. The difference was astounding. People treated me very differently. Suddenly they were scared of me. I mentioned to some friends that people were now crossing the street to avoid me. One of them, a tall black male, said, "Well now you know." And he's right. I look for it now and I see white people doing stuff like this all the time. I'm sure I miss a lot of it, too.

Anecdotes aside, a study shows that people with white-sounding names get 50% more job callbacks than people with black-sounding names: http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

I agree that there's substantial class discrimination, and further that being poor in the US is a bucket of shit. But although white privilege may have lessened in the last 50 years, it is still alive and well.

[rmc]

Another way (as a man) to get an idea of what's going on. Join a kitting/crochet group. Try to learn how to knit. (There's knitting circles all over the place) You'll find yourself in a female dominated environment, tis a kinda weird feeling at first, and a bit eye opening.

[rmc]

Race isn't the only issue. Poverty/classism is also an issue. In some contexts poor white people are more privileged than poor black people, and in some cases less privileged than a rich (white or black or …) person. But race is an issue, so we should tackle it. And poverty is an issue, so we should tackle it.

For an example of benefits of being white in USA, have a look at this: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html#daily