So y'all are mostly woke but I feel like white privilege is one of those things that people have a huge debate about when it really just comes down to a simple misunderstanding/semantics so imma go ahead and explain it.

White privilege doesn't mean being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It doesn't mean that you're rich or have a nice house or your parents bought you a car on your 16th birthday.

Basically, what it means is that you don't have to deal with a lot of the shitty little things that our society does to remind minorities of their status as minorities/marginalized ("you're pretty for a black girl", "damn mami you lookin' caliente tonight", etc)

You never have feel like a "representative for your whole race" in the sense that if a white dude leaves a bad tip, nobody's going to say that "white people are bad tippers", but if a black dude does than people are quicker to go "see, i told you black people are bad tippers".

Your achievements aren't boiled down to your race. A black kid in a mostly white town who worked hard to get good at football will be treated like he's expected to be good, because of his race. Same with Asian kids who are good at school. At the same time, things like college acceptances and job opportunities are discredited for some minorities, due to being "because of affirmative action" or "because they were black". (Sidebar: this is also sort of a deflection thing, I think. It's easier to tell yourself you didn't get hired but the black guy did because of affirmative action than it is because he was better than you or worked harder than you)

You never have to deal with the institutional racism of society that leads to things like minorities having a tougher time getting loans from banks, shopkeepers following minorities around stores more closely, being treated with more hostility by authority figures, having your resume passed over because your name is ethnic sounding, etc.

It seems to me like there are so many white people that reject the notion of white privilege because it implies that they're privileged, and they don't feel that way. Because, to them, and within our society, whiteness is normative. White is the standard, so having "the standard" shouldn't be seen as privilege.

People also see the word privilege and interpret it in a way that it undercuts their hard work, so reject it on that basis.

But in reality, it's just a simple semantic thing. It seems to me like the argument against white privilege is "it's not that we have advantages, it's that we don't have the disadvantages that other people have"

which, to people for which having those disadvantages is "their" standard, not having disadvantages looks a hell of a lot like having advantages. At the end of the day, it's two sides of the same coin, and I wish more people would realize that because it would end a lot of needless arguing and open people up to having a lot more empathy about this subject