Verified by 
Those who are interested in the social justice conversation are bound to hear a lot about "privilege," a term commonly denoting, “a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group.”
On the first pass, the issue seems clear. We want society to be fair. This requires that unearned social advantages be distributed randomly, so everyone has the same chance of obtaining them (For example, a coin toss decides who shoots first in the dual. Yes, I just watched Hamilton).
Earned benefits are to be decided on merit, which requires that all the participants have equal opportunity to compete under the same rules (everyone has the same weapon and number of shots in the dual).
Privilege rigs the game by bestowing unearned advantage on certain select groups, which improves their odds of obtaining the earned advantages, thus letting group affiliation rather than true merit decide the game. (If you get to take the first shot every time, then you are likely to win most duals, even if you’re the poorer shot.)
Identifying and eliminating unfair advantages is desirable for everyone because unfairness oppresses, and an oppressive system, while harming the oppressed sooner and more harshly, ends up destroying the oppressor as well. The torturers will inevitably be (and become) tortured.
Yet, inserting "privilege" into the conversation these days tends to provoke all manner of ire. Those on the right deem the whole notion a lie, an assault on traditional values by those who lack grit and personal responsibility, or a lazy misreading of the data that serves, by way of eliciting cheap moral outrage, to promote a leftist political agenda.
On the left, the term is increasingly being used to shame, silence, or dismiss certain "privileged" voices without regard to the merits of their claims, resulting, ironically, in an inverse form of oppression and the substitution of one oppressive hierarchy for another. As Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico writes: “Some social-justice circles have created an inverse social hierarchy based on intersecting membership in groups that traditionally lack privilege or experience oppression. In this inverse pecking order, a black queer female might be at the top while a straight white male would be at the bottom, unable to question things said by people above him lest he be accused of bigotry.”
Finally, one test of the value of a given rhetorical or conceptual device is whether it advances the discourse and helps move society in the direction of goodness. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy notes in TNR, the data on privilege in this regard are not good. So far, the ascent of privilege appears to have produced more heat than light, more hostility than solidarity, and a more impoverished, rather than richer, dialogue.
How to account for this dismal state of affairs? For one, the rhetoric of privilege is jumbled. As philosopher Michael Monahan of the University of Memphis notes, "privilege" as commonly used tends to conflate those things that no one should be entitled to do (like owning another person) and those things we are all entitled to (like a good education). The former is something someone has that no one should have. The latter is something someone doesn’t have that everyone should have. The former represents the pure concept of privilege, yet it is the latter meaning—better defined as oppression—that is most often invoked when "privilege" enters the conversation.
Moreover, privilege is currently viewed as an unconscious, invisible bias, and the flip side of overt racism. Privileged people are viewed as blind to their own privilege. Yet, as Monahan notes, to grow up white or male (or heterosexual or able-bodied, etc.) in America and not appreciate the unearned advantages inherent therein requires a level of inattention not easily dismissed as innocent. Intentionally working to not know moral harm implicates one in a moral cover-up. Ignorance of the law doesn’t make you innocent of the offense, especially if that ignorance was cultivated intentionally for the purpose of committing the offense.
Beyond rhetoric, the idea of "privilege" as key to understanding and correcting social ills is vulnerable to other confusions. First, we must decide where privilege actually lies. Locating it within the individual is problematic. Like Bob Dylan (and Walt Whitman before him) said, we all contain multitudes. Calculating properly an individual’s "privilege" thus involves trying to ascertain and assign proper weight to their myriad, and intertwined, characteristics, habits, and affiliations—an untenable undertaking. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy notes: “Anyone can be ‘privileged’ if it suits someone else’s argument.”
The concept of privilege makes more sense when applied to group differences. In this sense, "privilege" is conceptually akin to "heritability." Heritability estimates the extent to which differences in people's genes account for differences in their traits. It does not, however, tell us how much of an individual’s given trait is genetic.
We may find that 50 percent of the difference in happiness between members of a group is accounted for by genetic differences. But that does not mean that any one person’s happiness is 50 percent genetic. Likewise, we can calculate how the differences in people’s race, sex, etc. (privilege) account for differences in their social outcomes. But how much of one’s individual success depends on one being white or male (etc.) is impossible to know.
If privilege resides in the group, then calling someone "privileged" denotes only their group affiliation while disregarding individual character, behavior, or values. As Monahan notes: “White privilege benefits individual whites because of their whiteness, not because of their individual actions.”
Group privilege, then, merely loads the dice for the members of certain groups. Which groups? That depends on the society. Thus, privilege may be best seen as residing in the social order. As the late sociologist Allan Johnson wrote: “What privilege does is load the odds one way or the other so that the chance of bad things happening to white people as a category of people is much lower than for everyone else, and the chance of good things happening is much higher. Privilege is not something a person can have, like a possession… Instead, it is a characteristic of the social system—like a rule in a game—in which everyone participates.”
But identifying privilege as a systematic group (as opposed to individual) advantage within a social system presents its own issues. First, we live among concrete persons, not abstract group affiliations. Appraising a person by their group affiliation rather than their individual merit amounts, by definition, to the type of stereotyping that ends up undermining rather than promoting social justice.
In this context, telling a person to "check their privilege" reduces them to their group label, thus implicitly dismissing their personhood. Those whose personhood has long been dismissed may find a measure of satisfaction in doing some dismissing themselves, for a change. Yet a system of oppression is morally corrupt, no matter who’s doing the oppressing.
Moreover, group (and intergroup) dynamics are never simple, even when they seem to be. As the saying (attributed to H.L. Mencken) goes: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” For example, systematic group differences are easy to document. It is tempting and intuitive to attribute them to systematic group bias. Yet, as Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson note, even if we know that discrimination causes outcome differences between groups (and we do), the existence of such outcome differences does not automatically imply discrimination, since many other causes of such differences also exist.
In other words, while rigging the game will result in one team constantly winning, the fact that one team keeps winning does not necessarily mean that the game is rigged. Perhaps they happened to hire a gifted coach. That’s not cheating, it isn’t unfair, and it isn’t oppression.
Having acquired a big hammer, we need to resist the temptation to see all problems as nails.
Finally, even once we’ve identified that privilege exists and is consequential, the question remains as to what we should do. The current zeitgeist advocates seeking to eliminate it, or at least account for and correct it. The heart of this effort is righteous. The game can, and should, be made fairer. One (long overdue, morally imperative, and inevitably forthcoming) example of how this may be done in the U.S. is by returning to African American families not just their stolen historical rights, but also their stolen wages. In other words: reparations.
Alas, such steps, while necessary, are unlikely to be sufficient. This is because considered broadly, every game is unfair to someone since it must define concrete rules and boundaries and occupy a concrete niche, which will inevitably privilege some set of unearned characteristics over others. Horse racing advantages the short rider. Basketball advantages tall people. Either way, one’s height is an unearned privilege.
Thus, where society exists, so will privilege. Every society, if it is to approach fairness, must devise ways to attenuate the accumulating effects of privilege. At the same time, society must also diversify privilege, by creating more niches, more "games," more paths and means toward fulfillment, prosperity, and expression. You don’t solve the problem of concentrated wealth by eliminating wealth, but by spreading it, and by creating multiple paths toward achieving it. In a society thus organized, a person too short for basketball can still make it as a jockey (and nobody be throwin' away their… shot).
