As someone who is still actively overcompensating to make up ground, this is the best summary about privilege I have ever seen.

It's also pretty interesting how a lot of perception about privilege is tied to who your parents are. My parents are fairly well-off middle class straight white heterosexual undivorced Americans. We live in a decent house with working cars, and dad has a decently playing software engineering job.

Based on all that it would be assumed that I have a fair dose of privilege, being white and having middle-class parents who let me live with them, and who could give me the initial supportive and financial push to be successful.

Except... my parents aren't like that. Not once would they cosign a college loan, or an apartment lease, or a credit card, or pretty much anything else that's practically required to get that traditional push out into the real world. On top of all that, they were rarely willing to drive me 20+ miles to where the full-time jobs I needed to save for my own life were, just the crumby minimum wage jobs that only gave ~10-20 hours a week close by. Even that wouldn't be a problem, except that where we live, there's no public transport or cabs or pedestrian safe roads, and the closest trace of civilization is 6-8 miles away.

You can be in as privileged a family as you want, but if you're denied access to resources like public transport or supportive parents, you can be shit out of luck. Or, at least, with WAY slimmer luck.

That said, I'm finally getting lucky with my first real office job, making twice as much as I ever did working full time at food service restaurants, and it finally looks like I'm on track to move out on my own (again), and have a stable lifestyle. But at 25 years old, it just took way longer than someone would assume looking at the privilege presumably provided by my parents. Maybe I'm being unrealistic and impatient, but it's hard not to feel that way when I look at all my close-aged friends around me, having graduated college and living on their own and having careers and even getting married for ~3 years, now. And, of course, the defining factor was usually that they had supportive middle class parents and/or lived in more urban areas.

/r/comics Thread Parent Link - thewireless.co.nz