Having worked in the poor parts of Washington DC, and receiving deferential treatment far above and beyond what I actually earned, I can tell you without any doubt that white privilege exists. It is ingrained in our society. And it is not merely whites with power using their power to benefit one another and not other peoples. It is the expectation that permeates every interaction between people of different ethnicities in this country. It is the lifetime learning by non-whites that when they don't treat whites with deference, consequences follow, and when one wants favors, one gets them by sucking up to whites, not to others.
Anecdotes, no matter how true, do not make data, however. If one wants to see the reality of white privilege, one need only understand that a child born to black parents is five times as likely to grow up in poverty as a child born to white parents. Instrumental to denying the very real privileges and oppressions of race in this country is to insist that these black families have brought it upon themselves, as if anyone with the means to change those kinds of circumstances would fail to do so.
Of course white privilege exists. And racial oppression exists. In often insidious and invisible ways. Overt forms like slavery and Jim Crow are gone, but the attitudes that inform them are often uncomfortably proximate to us.
