Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)
The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.
But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.
