Have I benefited from white privilege?

This issue comes up a lot in the internet circles I frequent. A lot of people argue that white privilege isn't even real, because they haven't experienced it. Recently, someone asked how I, specifically, had benefited from white privilege lately.

Well, here are two things: intersectionality is a BEAST of a thing to understand, but it's important to. In sum, having privilege in one area doesn't mean that everything goes right for you all the time, or even that you can't be without privilege in other areas. I feel like the people I hear this from most often are poor white people. "How can I be privileged," they ask, "when we were on food stamps?"

The answer is, you didn't have class privilege, but you did have white privilege, because a person of color with the exact same economic circumstances as you might have had things just a little harder. Maybe they got caught by the police doing the same kinds of things you did and didn't get caught for. Maybe your neighborhood had better schools, so you got a better education.

I saw a great video once that asked people to take a step forward if they had never had to fear holding hands with their romantic partner in public. A step back if they had to take out loans for college. A step forward if they were usually not the only person of their race in the room. A step back if they had a physical disability. A step forward if school holidays aligned with those of their religious faith.

The idea is that you can be privileged in some ways and not in others.

But the other thing is that the reason people are so skeptical of white privilege (if they have it) is that it is beautifully, perfectly invisible to us. If a cop pulls me over for having an expired registration, reminds me to put the sticker on, and then lets me go on my merry way, he is about 100% certain NOT to say, "and you can chalk this up to your whiteness. Have a nice day."

How many jobs did I get over the equally qualified Latisha, who interviewed also? I'll never know! How many of those times I did something stupid did I fail to get in serious trouble because someone unconsciously thought of me as a "good kid" instead of a thug? It's a mystery! When I was first driving and got pulled over for going MORE than ten mph over the speed limit and also passing someone on the right, and THEN didn't know where to pull over, so pulled over on the left shoulder (I know, I know!!), and the officer decided to say on the ticket that I'd been going LESS than ten mph over the limit, was it because of my alabaster brow? No fucking clue. I didn't know, I didn't ask, and I'll probably never know.

And it would be easy as hell to go through life imagining that every good thing that ever happened to me, I deserved, and every bad thing that ever happened to someone else, they deserved. And those employers and cops? They probably weren't consciously favoring me, and wouldn't admit to racial bias. In fact, most people who want to argue against white privilege will name a bad thing that happened to them and say it's proof that there's no such thing. Shit, most people can look at 44 white Presidents and 1 Black one and say "See? Doesn't exist."

That's one of the reasons that it's so insidious -- it's absolutely undetectable to those who don't want to detect it.

Ultimately, saying that I believe (I am SURE) that I have benefited from white privilege isn't a comment on my success, my hard work, or my luck. It's a comment on society. And of course privilege or the lack thereof isn't a 100% determiner of where you'll end up. But it can put the wind at your back, or it can fill your knapsack with rocks.

So to answer the question of when is the last time I benefited from white privilege: probably last night, when my white ass went out after dark, parked across from the park in front of someone's house, sat in the car with the engine running for 10 minutes, and then drove away with nobody calling the cops on me (or even reporting "suspicious activity" on NextDoor). It happens that I was playing Pokemon GO, but if I was a little more melanin-enriched? I'm not sure I would have felt so comfortable going out and doing that.