What is privilege?

Firstly, it is important to understand what privilege is and how it is tied to equality of opportunity (also known as the American Dream). The term “privilege” does not mean that members of a privileged group are incapable of experiencing societal issues nor does it mean that they cannot achieve success through hard work. For instance, blue-collar workers, including white and nonwhite people, can struggle to make a living, even though white people in America are often considered to be more privileged.

Rather, being privileged means having access to societal resources and opportunities that others may not have. Quoting Lexico, a privilege is “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”

Therefore, saying that white people are privileged does not mean that all white people are rich and all Black people are poor. It also does not mean that all white people are racist. Being white tends to offer more opportunities for social mobility, but only some white people receive the benefits of these opportunities. White people receive more opportunities in their lifetime than Black people in America and are thus privileged. However, having more opportunities increases chances of success, similar to how having more arrows to shoot can increase the likelihood of hitting a bullseye in an archery range.

One form of privilege is racial privilege. To paraphrase from Encyclopedia Britannica, a race is a category of people that has been established by society based on physical features. When discussing white versus Black people, race is based on skin color, a trait that we cannot choose since it is assigned at birth. Many Americans believe that people of different races are treated differently.

Up to this point, I have asserted that being white is a privilege in America, but do white people actually receive more opportunities than other minorities, particularly Black Americans? Take, for example, this argument: a police officer acts differently when dealing with a white person in comparison with a Black person.

One measure of this difference comes from the FBI’s Universal Crime Report, which gathers data from police departments across the nation. According to the 2017 report, Black Americans make up 27.3% of all arrested individuals, but they only make up 12.3% of the national population. In other words, Black Americans are more than two times overrepresented in arrest rates. (Note, too, that the arrest rate for white people may actually be smaller since the FBI does not separate data for Hispanic Americans when categorizing arrests for all races.)

Keep in mind that a person who is arrested is not necessarily guilty of a crime. Overall arrest rates and other broad statistics can also oversimplify the issue. Regardless, criminologists generally agree that a race disparity does exist in the criminal justice system.

How many arrested individuals are actually guilty of something? Take drug violations, for instance. Although drug usage rates are relatively constant among people of different races, “More than one in four people arrested for drug law violations in 2015 was Black,” as cited by the Sentencing Project. A 2017 National Registry of Exonerations study found that almost half of exonerated criminals are Black, and “innocent Black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.”

The issue of overrepresentation extends beyond arrest data. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “A Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person,” violating the 4th Amendment right to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” From more than 7 years of monitoring police use of deadly force, Black people are again more than twice overrepresented in the data collected by Mapping Police Violence, making them 3 times more likely to be killed while being 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed in comparison to white Americans.

The list goes on.

Certainly, it’s agreeable that Americans should follow the law, but we must consider the law’s consequences via its enforcement. Clearly, a group of people that is more likely to be unjustly arrested, incarcerated, and even killed by the criminal justice system is disadvantaged. As a result of unfair enforcement of laws, Black Americans confront more significant barriers in their daily activities that contribute to an unequal access to American opportunity.

This is one example of why we say that white Americans have privilege. Other examples can be found in Black Americans’ experiences. One good article to start with is Christine Emba’s op-ed in The Washington Post, “What is white privilege?”