It predisposes us to assume that the privileges possessed by an individual are one of the primary drivers of the experiences they have had in their life. Privilege isn't uniformly distributed across all members of a group.
Let's say that group Y enjoys a much higher college acceptance rate. Due to their privilege, 80% of applicants from group Y are accepted to college. Do the 20% of applicants from group Y who were denied also posses the privilege of greater rates of college acceptance? Is it right for me to assume that since an individual belongs to group Y, they have personally benefited from this particular privilege?
Let me be clear: I think that taking a hard look at inequalities between groups and seeking to ameliorate them is the right thing to do, and something we should all be doing. What I find problematic is using broad statistics to make assumptions about individual people.
People like to imagine that they don't actually make policy decisions, then they have no influence on the world. That's really not the case, and the best course of action is to be aware of the influence you have, and make sure your biases aren't influencing things in a negative way.
What exact privilege does growing up desperately poor in rural West Virginia bring you? A person from a middle class black family in NYC would have much more opportunity.
Yes, each person would face their own set of challenges (ie, the black person vis-a-vis the police, although believe me that unjustified police brutality happens to white people too). But it's wrong to judge one as being "privileged" based solely on their skin color, without knowing anything about them.
Sadly, I noticed that most of the people shouting "privilege" at others themselves come from very privileged backgrounds, and have learned this attitude at some expensive private liberal arts college. I'm not sure what is driving their crusades (guilt?), but again, I was raised that it's not right to judge people based solely on their skin color, regardless of the rational behind it. And fail as I may sometimes, I will continue to strive toward that goal.
Finally, what about those of us coming from a mixed-race background, with a grandparent or great-grandparent from a "non-privileged" group? If you look hard at some of us, you can see evidence of that group. Are we partially privileged? Or is being privileged a discrete state?
I would argue that height, intelligence, general health, economic class, propensity for addictive behaviors, wealth of your parents, children rearing skills of your parents, closeness of extended family, social network of your family, family religion, access to nutrition, country of birth, access to healthcare (I could go on and on) all help/hurt your potential in life.
Saying that "you're [white, male, rich] so you're privileged" is ridiculous when it only one of probably thousands of different factors that can impact your success in life. It's lazy thinking.
The term just isn't nuanced enough.
Like, for example, there are those studies that show how people with names that sound traditionally black don't get called for job interviews nearly as often. Take the name off the resume and they get called with parity to traditionally white-sounding names.
Or, for another example, it used to be that orchestral auditions were conducted where you could see the player as they played. Orchestras of the period were heavily male-dominated. After they switched to blind auditions--that is, the player plays behind a partition, so you can't see whether they're male or female--suddenly a lot more women started getting hired for orchestral musician positions. The gender balance has begun approaching parity, when the listeners can't see who's playing.
You're right that generic white guy is "invisible," but another way to look at it is, we're the standard. We fit the type everyone wants already. We don't stand out, because we're basically the accepted definition of an acceptable person. We are who you hire, put in your tv shows, give housing loans to, etc.
Just like you mention, blind auditions boiled the interview down to the only thing that matters - the music. And if they were truly better at playing than the others, the orchestra was hurting itself by not hiring them in the first place. Other competing orchestras could implement the blind-audition approach and play much better music and get more audience members as a result.
The last thing you want, however, is to swing the other direction and give people jobs based primarily on their minority status. That's as bad as nepotism/cronyism and it rots organizations in the same way.
You know, in situations like this I'm often reminded of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I think a lot of the pushback against awareness and understanding of privilege comes from that idea.
Being told that you're getting some lucky break because you're a hetero white dude, whether it's preferential treatment in job interview callbacks or orchestra hiring or any of the million other things that have been so insanely thoroughly documented.. well, kinda draws attention to the possibility that, if we were living in a meritocratic world, suddenly all us lucky white dudes would have to compete with a much wider group of people. A man's salary and all that.
As far as swinging the other way and preferring people for their minority status, quite frankly, I'm totally ok with doing so for a generation or two, since I would at least be trying to compensate for hundreds of years of systemic bias against those beleaguered groups of people. Forever? Naw. For now? Sure, even if it means I personally would lose out on contracts or whatever.
But our disagreement here is something to work out in the political arena, not something I think it makes sense to try and bridge from first principles or anything; I at least used to feel the way you do, and came to change my mind about it only through a lot of life experience that told me it made sense to change my mind.
Consider scholarships: if you're a white male, you have to be exceptional vs your cohort in some other way (academics, athletics, etc) to find a scholarship. If you're a minority, you have to... be a minority. That's a disadvantage of being Generic White Male #434242.
To be clear, I fully recognize that real, actual race-based discrimination on a systemic scale happened fairly recently in the US, and to an extent still happens today. 100% no argument there.
The problem with "privilege" as a label is that it describes a population, yet is applied consistently - sometimes weaponized - to individuals.
Which, funnily enough, is one of the benefits of it, you can ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, because the bias it implies wouldn't effect you anyway.
I don't try to convince climate change deniers either, because I learned long ago that you can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.
My argument is fairly constrained in scope and can logically be broken down like this: privilege can be used to describe a group but not applied to an individual. This should be axiomatic; incorrectly applying group properties to an individual is known as an ecological or division fallacy. Whenever you hear (or invoke) an admonition to "check your privilige", consider whether this error is being made.
The thing is, people know this. I know they know this because any example of "anti-privilige" is summarily dismissed as a unique case representing the elastic nature of privilige.
The other thing that makes privilige hard to discuss is that when you question assumptions or ask for specifics, you are instantly dismissed as an enemy of the cause. Your reply here is a great example. Above you mention "a million other things" that have been "insanely thoroughly documented", I said I'd like to see them to look at them critically, and that trigged Red Alert. At that point you lumped me in with climate change deniers and considered me irrational, because asking questions makes me the Enemy. This is a pattern that occurs frequently; the CoC discussion on php-internals took a similar path. It's such a bizarre thing to me, because as engineers we all follow a rubric that's roughly: 1. identify and describe the problem 2. consider solutions 3. implement the best solution. But in the social justice arena, trying to participate in #1 gets you cast out as oblivious, ignorant, irrational, or worse -- unless you belong to a certain in-group.
In the quest for inclusion, it seems like there's a lot of exclusion happening.
So just curious: what's with referring to men as "dudes" when you're trying to make points about inclusive behavior and language and such? I'm seeing this a lot, and this weird language tic really detracts from whatever point the person is making. You don't refer to women as "chicks," do you?
That's the point - being invisible is a privileged state. Black people are not invisible the US, where some people (not all) will inevitably treat them with suspicion (or worse).
So compared to a rich, white expat in some African or Asian country, the typical resident of said country is privileged? Because in that country, compared to the expat, the resident is essentially invisible, and the white expat is decidedly not invisible.
And many people will treat the expat with suspicion, or worse. Are all of those people "privileged", and the expat "not privileged"?
There may have been some confusion as I apparently left out a word ("/in/ the US"). I'm only discussing privilege in the US.
I have no idea how these things work in Africa or Asia. Presumably there are similar situations in other countries, though that is a guess. Your scenario sounds reasonable - yes, the natives would have the privilege of starting with the "default" level of suspicion while the (white) foreigner has to overcome an extra scrutiny.
Privilege can be overcome. You specified a rich expat, and money can be a very effective way to make problems go away. However, a similarly rich native will probably have to spend somewhat less money in similar situations because of their privilege.