That’s the difference between “white privilege” and not having it. Your experience, Diana, is what many would call “white privilege”. As the recent events in Ferguson, St. Louis, and elsewhere around the country show, white privilege is very much alive and well. I dread the backlash white people (myself included) will face when we’re the true minority, and it’s coming very quickly.

I agree with James.

To call a situation where interference without cause by the police is the norm “white privilege” is to argue that to suffer the unfounded harassment by the police is the norm and should be the norm. Privilege implies something achieved by legalistic means and in a society where equality under the law is the standard, those enjoying such a “privilege” should be stripped of it. But in fact, such immunity from unjustified police intrusion is not a privilege, it is a right. Those still retaining the remainders of that right shouldn’t be further violated under the guise of ‘equality’; what should happen is that those not allowed that right in practice should be, under the principle of equality before the law.

The current norm is that rights are routinely denied and violated by those in authority and that circle of violation continues to grow. Not all cops are bullies, but sufficient numbers of them are, and they target the weakest in the community, whether that be minorities or those who obviously don’t have the means to fight back, legally. I know for a fact that our own police here in a mid-sized town in the Rocky Mountain West made it a point to do exactly that. It got to be enough of a problem that conservative business owners, whose minimum wage employees were being unjustly harassed, were broaching the topic at an ACLU gathering and pushing for some outside review for police misconduct because the cops were always found to be ‘following departmental procedure’ and exonerated for acts up to and including murder.

My objection to the term “white privilege” is fourfold;

1. It miscasts the problem as preferential treatment of a few when the real problem is rights’ violating treatment of the many.

2. It suffers from the envious outlook of Left-Egalitarianism which is why I think that non-ideological leftists make the mistake laid out in point #1 . 3. It is frequently used by ideological leftists as a variant of the rhetorical device, “Shut up, he explained.”

4. It represents a form of polylogism that argues one cannot conceptually grasp the injustices inflicted on any particular group unless you are a member of that particular group.

I think that the principled approach is to recognize that the violation of individual rights is rampant and look to curtail those violations across the entire citizenry by striking at the roots of that evil. And from where I sit, the War On Drugs, subsequent police militarization, and the undermining of the Bill of Rights that proceeds from that (and our feckless War on Terror) are where we should be applying the axe.