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Indeed, you may not be as privileged as someone born in an affluent suburb of London. Hopefully someone that did have that background would take that into account when making assumptions about your past and motives. Different people can have different privileges - you can't necessarily win at privilege.

If you at least skim read the checklists you will see that most of the examples don't take the form of anything like handouts or support groups.

By telling me "Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is." you are using the concept of privilege in your argument and are essentially telling me to check my privilege. I'm ok with that.

Privilege isn't about discrediting anyone. It is about helping us understand the experiences of other people.

Way to spin this in a nice tone, you must be great in sales. No I am not telling you to "check your privilege".

I am asking you to not discredit ME based on your definition of privilege, which is really just a generalization under a different name. You generalized and put me in the "white male" category, then applied blanket assumptions to that group as a whole.

There is no such thing as "privilege". There is bias, and it differs from person to person. One manager may care if they are hiring a short lesbian black woman, another may not, that is up to the dynamic of the two individuals and cannot be attributed to some sort of greater force, privilege.

At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters. If you come to me with a shit portfolio and a 2.0 GPA, and you happen to be a short black lesbian female, that has less to do with your privilege and more to do with the fact that your works sucks.

I hire people. I hire people old, young, black, white, transexual, poor, wealthy, gay, straight, anyone. It's the work that matters.

Anybody who patches up their own deficiencies with "privilege plaster" should steer themselves in a different direction.

FWIW, your argument that you do not have the privileges that your interlocutor assigned you is an argument from lived experience:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Lived_experience

When you say that bias differs from person to person, I don't think anyone would disagree. Do you believe that it differs such that the net effect is exactly neutral across the population?

At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters.

I admire your willingness to put forward a testable hypothesis. Unfortunately, it has been tested, and (at least for scientists) is wrong: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/

Which leaves you claiming that you are peculiarly immune from robustly observed cognitive biases. This may well be true for you particularly, but even if that is the case it is still not a widely followed effect (even among people who believe themselves to be gender-blind).

It's not about handouts. And you can have privilege in one domain and lack of privilege in others.

Are you a white male? The fact that you had a hard life doesn't negate the fact that you derive certains advantages from being white, and male.

You say you've had it hard. That's an absolute measure. Privilege is a relative measure. If you had had the same circumstances, except you were black, your life would be hard-ER. A relative measure.

You should take a look at the linked privilege checklists. For each item that applies, ask yourself: would my life be hard-ER, in a relative sense, if this weren't true for me?

That's not my point. You cannot infer from the color of my skin how hard or easy my life has been.

What just happened was, someone commented that I have it easy because of my supposed white privilege. They simply just assumed I'm from a white middle class post-college family just because of my skin color.

Now if this was real life, and I worked at some nice company, now I have to fear people blaming my position and my state in life because of my privilege, when in reality it was me who struggled day and night with basic necessities to get to where I am today.

Nobody is denying that privilege exists in our little micro upper class bubble, which is my point exactly. Did some hiring manager have a better outlook on me when they first met me? Yeah probably, but that doesn't do shit for me if I can't back myself up with good work.

It's just such a dumb inane topic. I am now being discredited and disregarded because of "white privilege".

The benefits of being a white male in this society are negligible at BEST.

> The benefits of being a white male in this society are negligible at BEST.

That's probably going to be the funniest thing I read on HN today.

Despite commenting multiple times in this thread, you still do not seem to have looked at any of the privilege checklist, and you have not said that the privileges listed there do not apply to you or are not useful:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

That's an article on white privilege. For numbers 1-50, would you make the claim that they either i. do not apply to you, OR ii. are of only marginal use, and you'd be fine with them not being true

Would you make that claim for all 50? Again, NO ONE is saying your lift hasn't been hard. Privilege is a relative claim. It can only make life harder or easier, not hard or easy.

I can't speak for the OP, but I'll give my own perspective.

Many of these items are nothing but restatements of "if I want to stick to my own (racial) kind, it helps to be in the majority." Since I have no particular desire to stick to my own (racial) kind, I'm fine with them not being true.

Of the remainder, I assert they are not a big deal. In a few days I'm travelling from a location where they are true (UK) to a location where they are not (India) and it was not a significant factor in my decision. I've devoted far more thought to things like the the weather, consistent running water or a gym than I have to anything on this list.

> Now I have to deal with people thinking I was skyrocketed into the good life simply because I'm a tall white male. The reality is I gave up a substantial portion of the beginning of my life to propel myself into the life I'm in.

This is a strawman. The concept of privilege isn't "white males are always fantastically successful"! Privilege means that, on average, someone identical to you but female, dark skinned, disabled, etc. would - again, in general - have a harder time of it.

Yeah, that's entitlement, not privilege. Look at the world we currently live in. Everything we do has already been done for us.

Look at it from my point of view. I now live in a world where:

- I don't ever have to think about money, or food, or basic necessities - Everything I do is simply making use of all the shit that has been delivered right to my doorstep

Define "harder", because if you are struggling in the first world with such intangibles like race, skin color, and sexuality, then you really need to check yourself and realize how good you have it.

Because some random manager or someone formed an initial bias about you based on your outward appearance is not privilege, it's personal bias and we all have it.

The fact that I work at arguably the whitest place to work (largest investment bank in a first world country) that employs over 50% females of all varieties already wrecks your "privilege" assumption.

Do you know why? All those different people were hired solely based on their work and experience, nothing else.

I see all these articles and postings about what white privilege affords me, but none of it is concrete. I can't find anything tangible, where someone was explicitly discriminated against in the tech industry for their skin color or sexual preference.

I'm also gay as it fucking gets, yet I don't go around flaunting it and start making it a problem, to the point where my life revolves around my sexuality.

> Do you know why? All those different people were hired solely based on their work and experience, nothing else.

This is demonstrably false on a non-anecdotal scale. http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...