[vfa33]

No doubt that your average Indian experiences a greater degree of poverty than your average Oaklandian, but that isn't the only factor in privilege. Can you imagine what it does to a child when they see someone get shot in the street outside their house, or get their home raided, or lose family member(s) to incarceration / murder / drug addiction? It's a different kind of struggle, and I wouldn't be so quick to say that one group is more or less privileged than the other.

[yummyfajitas]

Personally I feel that "privilege" is an ill-defined concept and should be ignored by intelligent people. I've never seen a concrete definition that a proponent of privilege was actually willing to stand by.

(E.g., people show me this essay http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html to explain "white privilege", then rapidly shift the goalposts once I point out that every point applies to me when I live in India.)

I suppose you are right that the relatives of drug addicts, murder victims and criminals might have more problems than others. But then why is happyscrappy talking about black people in Oakland rather than the children of junkies?

Note that India has junkies, criminals and bad parents too. In addition to having bad parents, the children of Indian junkies are also legally barred from working in the US (unlike, e.g., an Oakland child of junkies). It's true that Indians are less murder-happy than Oaklanders, but they have all sorts of other traumatizing events (e.g. rampant eve teasing, a high rate of traffic fatalities, multi-day water cuts).