My point is that I would call that "discrimination" against minorities, not white "privilege". It may just be semantics, but I think it's important. I don't know why our national debate has changed from eliminating discrimination against minorities (which I support) to eliminating white privilege. Being treated with dignity as a human being is not a privilege. It's a right. And by flipping the problem on its head by focusing on white privilege instead of discrimination against minorities, it implies all whites have the same privileges. We don't.
For example, I'm Polish. My family came to the US around 1900 and was dirt poor. They were peasants in Poland and factory workers (if they had work) in the US. They were discriminated against (dumb Pollacks). My father changed his name because no one could pronounce his weird name and they thought he might be a Jew, so they didn't want to hire him for anything but menial work. This was in the 1940s. Of course, things got a lot better for Polish people and now we're just considered "white". And things were never as bad for Poles in the US as they were for blacks, of course. But it's not like my family has the same privilege that some old money WASP family has. We came from completely different backgrounds, completely different cultures, and completely different economic statuses. And it's not like our path from poor, hated, minority was a straight upward rise. There was a lot of alcoholism, crime, abuse, and death along the way. Yet to non-whites we're all just "you guys". We're all white, so we all the same. We're not. We didn't all come from blue-blood families and go to Stanford. A lot of us are just schlubs. We have nothing in common with the rich people that run the country except the color of our skin.
White people don't get asked if they know how to speak english in the Midwest and the South. White people are never questioned about whether they're true Americans or not.
But I have been threatened with violence just for being white. I've been told I don't belong in the neighborhood where I was living, because I was white. Do I lose some of my privilege points for that? Or do the people that threatened me have more privilege in that neighborhood? Does that even out with being harassed for driving while black?
And I *have been wrongly arrested because I was a man in an altercation that happened to involve a woman (long story). My white privilege card was trumped by her female privilege card.
My point is that white people are not all the same and we don't all have the same level of "privilege" as each other. And I think focusing on privilege is counterproductive to the goal of ending discrimination. Focusing on privilege does nothing except try to make white people feel guilty. Those of us that realize we have things better than other people already feel guilty. The ones that don't have things good resent being made to feel guilty. The ones with real significant (economic) privilege don't give a shit what people think, and they don't feel guilty. So it's all just a waste of time.