For another way of thinking about how privilege works, here’s an analogy. Imagine a racetrack with all those little divided aisles for people to run. Have a rich, white, straight male on the farthest aisle, and he has an aisle that only has a few hurdles. Have a rich, white, straight female on the next aisle, and she has a couple more hurdles. Have a rich, straight female of color on the next aisle, and she has a few more hurdles than the rich, cisgendered, straight white female. Keep going down the line, adding more and more hurdles as you add each form of lack of privilege. And if you’ve got a situation where intersectionality is often at work — for example, a person of color who lives in poverty — throw an additional few hurdles into their aisle beyond what they already had.

Now, let everyone run the race. It’s likely that straight rich white guy is going to finish first. And as for everyone else — well, many of them will still make it over their hurdles and get there too, but it’s going to take some people a lot more effort than others. And some people have so many hurdles that they’re going to be psychologically beaten from the get-go. No, being white didn’t get you where you are now — nobody showed up in a car and drove you to the end of the race simply because you’re white. But being white made it easier to finish that race, even though you will have had additional hurdles from the other ways you may lack privilege (being gay, poor, etc). No matter how many hurdles you had, at least you didn’t have the additional hurdles that the person of color faced.

Also, what’s even more unfair is when that white guy finishes and says, “Well, I got here on my own two feet, so I don’t know what you all are whining about! If I can do it, so can you!” That’s the nature of privilege, both to discount the ways it helps us and to refuse to see the ways a lack of privilege makes it harder for others.

White privilege once again manifests itself in the ability to ignore that translation. I think, though, we may be asking the wrong question, or, perhaps, one too few questions. With regards to “How do we get them to see it?” it is almost impossible to believe that most people don’t see it. It’s there, it’s right in front of their faces, but they actively choose to blame it on the hoodie instead of race. We learned that white people are often unwilling to talk about race. It is this unwillingness that is causing a lot of the problems here. So, perhaps, we should be asking, “How do we get them to talk about what they see?”