I had to write this for Politics of Diversity class so it had to be "politically correct". I only put my own opinion in at the end.
Peggy McIntosh, “an American feminist and anti-racist activist”, is author of a controversial 1988 piece entitled "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.", also known by its shorter form, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. She claims that white privilege is “an invisible package of unearned asserts” that whites “can count on cashing in each day”. She says that it’s “like an invisible knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks”. This alludes to the things that whites take for granted that blacks don’t always get.
According to Wikipedia, “White privilege is a sociological concept describing the advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice by the fact that a person benefiting from white privilege need not hold racist beliefs themselves. Some scholars claim that whiteness is a “property”. Critical race theorists “Cheryl Harris and George Lipshitz say [whiteness] is something of value owned by certain members of society”. According to Betsy Lucal, “current ideas about racism are limited because of their tendency to focus only on racial ‘minorities’ and the oppressive aspects of race, overlooking how whites are affected by race and indeed receive privileges through race”. Whites have trouble learning about the concept of white privilege because they don’t live with the consequences of not having it. According to Dan J. Pence and J. Arthur Fields, “resistance to acknowledging white privilege stems from the fact that whites often see inequality as a black or Latino issue” . The whites don’t realize that they benefit in life from being white, simply by being white.
Examples of white privilege include that whites may be treated in a certain positive way and not realize that blacks don’t get treated in that way. Blacks may be denied certain things in life because whites are afraid to deal with them. Professor Clyburn has said that he was left to bleed nearly to death because medical workers were afraid to treat him because they thought black blood is infected and were afraid of catching blood-borne diseases. Another example is that white couples don’t get stared at when they walk in public but interracial couples such as Professor Clyburn and his white wife do get stared at when they walk in public. Whites take these things for granted because they don’t have to deal with it.
Wikipedia cites additional examples of white privileges. One of these example is in the justice system. According to Wikipedia, “black Hispanic males are three times more likely than white males to have their vehicles stopped and searched by police”. This is because of the stereotype that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to commit crimes than whites. Wikipedia also states that whites are likely to lighter punishments than minorities when convicted of crimes in the American justice system. The article cites the statistic that “Black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical.”.
The critics of white privilege say that blacks are privileged to certain things that whites are not. They cite affirmative action as an example. They also say that blacks get jobs just because they’re black and can get away with doing things that whites can’t because the whites fear being labeled racist. Some even cite the fact that poor blacks get welfare as black privilege. Some whites say that the age of political correctness gives blacks privileges that whites don’t have.
All in all, there are probably some truths to both sides of the argument. Whites may be treated better by their fellow whites than blacks are treated by whites. At the same time, blacks are treated better by whites in terms of being politically correct and in reverse discrimination.