This is what privilege looks like.

 

My parents were your basic lower middle class white people. They "meant well," and "tried" ... sort of. But conversing with them on the topics of race and class for five minutes made it very easy to discern their perspective.

An example. One day we were watching the news and they ran a story about standardized testing (such as the SATs) and how these tests were often designed with implicit bias baked right in. They interviewed a student, who read from one of the tests she'd used as practice. 

"Differentiate between the musical styles of Wagner and Beethoven." She got the standard pronunciation of "Beethoven" right, but rather than pronouncing "Wagner" in the German style ("Vogner"), she used the more standard English pronunciation. I remember how my parents jumped on that. They were huge when it came to spelling, grammar, usage and pronunciation. 

"WAG-ner!" they scoffed, and turned away in dismissal. As if to say "She's obviously ignorant, so why should we take anything she says seriously?"

It clearly never, ever occurred to them that while they, in their Depression-era schools, still somehow got the chance to study music and art history, in which a teacher would presumably have mentioned the German composer Richard Wagner and used the common German pronunciation (bonus points if they pronounced his first name "Ree-cart"), some kids in the 1970s were already being subject to "fiscal austerity" and other cuts to public education. Money was still being shoveled toward reading and math, but the first subjects to be cut were the "soft" areas such as music, art, drama, vocational ed, sometimes PE, home economics and student clubs. And the first schools to get the funding axe were usually those in poorer neighborhoods. So no, the girl on the TV news didn't pronounce "Wagner" the way her age peers in the gated community did, but that's because she never had occasion to see the name in print and hear it pronounced as it would be in Wagner's native Germany. And so, of course she will see the name "Wagner" in printed form and read it that way, all the while attempting to make the point that she was being tested, and evaluated, on something she had never had the opportunity to learn in the first place.

That's privilege. You get something, take it for granted, and simply assume that everyone else has what you have. It could be education, a nice home, economic security, or some other sort of advantage. When you encounter someone who appears not to behave in an "advantaged" way, you blame that person, rather than the system that withheld those advantages from one group of people while lavishing them elsewhere.