Other factors offer far more privileges

The argument

The real privileges are not afforded to white people. They are afforded to those who grow up with two parents. Two-parent black families have a poverty rate of just 7%. On the other hand, single-parent white families have a poverty rate of 22%. It would appear that the real “privilege” is not being born white but being born into a two-parent household. If you want to attribute privilege to a certain race, Asian-Americans perform far better than white people. Not only do they have lower suicide rates, but they also tend to outperform whites in school, have better credit, and are about to surpass whites as the wealthiest race in the United States.

Context

There are other privileges that dwarf white privilege. We do not identify these as drivers of inequality or seek to address them in the way we do white privilege. Therefore, white privilege, as a major contributor to racial inequality, is a myth.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the comparison confounds the very variable it claims to isolate. Setting a two-parent household of one race against a single-parent household of another mixes family structure with race, so it cannot show that race carries no advantage; the like-for-like comparison — two-parent with two-parent, single-parent with single-parent — is what the claim of white privilege actually concerns. Showing that family structure matters does not show that race does not. They add that white privilege, as usually defined, is not the claim that white people are the most advantaged group on every measure or face no hardships. It is the narrower claim that race is not among a white person's disadvantages. Pointing to other privileges — class, family structure, or the outcomes of another minority group whose 'model minority' framing is itself contested — is compatible with racial advantage existing, since privileges intersect rather than cancel out. On this view the argument refutes a caricature, not the position it targets.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics note the statistic compares two-parent families of one race with single-parent families of another, confounding household structure with race; a like-for-like comparison is needed to show race confers no advantage. [Rejecting P2] That some Asian-Americans outperform white Americans on certain metrics is compatible with white privilege existing, since the claim is that race is not among a white person's disadvantages, not that whites lead every group on every measure. [Rejecting C] Privileges of class, family and race intersect rather than cancel; showing other factors matter does not establish that racial advantage does not exist.