If you are white and reading this, try this experiment.

Think about spending every day in society in at least one situation where someone looks and acts toward you with suspicion.

Really think about that and let it sit. At least once a day.

Every
Single
Day.

Place on top of that at least one experience per day where someone voices incorrect assumptions about you or your culture or both.

When you're done with all that, imagine that this is your starting point because the rest of society (i.e. everyone who is not of your caste) also has...

"...an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks."

Peggy McIntosh - Senior Research Scientist, Wellesley Centers for Women.

The invisible backpack to which McIntosh refers, is the covert or passive prejudgement that sits beneath the abovementioned overt behaviour; exemplified by the clutching of a handbag, the crossing of a street, or the passing over of a CV, promotion or interview call.*

Really attempting to inhabit what the black experience is, helps to understand that white privilege isn't an insult or an attempt to polarise, but instead a means of revealing that white privilege is apathetic.

And if white privilege is corollary to black oppression, then it is crucial that whites do not view the balance to which the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King guides us, as the loss of opportunity for whites; because being truly mindful of white privilege (i.e. viewing it with equanimity) brings home not the polarity of experience but the compassion that exemplifies humanity.

And if you're white and low socio-economic status and reading this, putting two and two together shows you that the success of your black brothers and sisters can only lead to your success too, because the oppressed bear an empathy too dark to visit on one another.

“People just need to love each other more than they do.”

John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon - Singer/Songwriter, The Sex Pistols.

* There is not enough space in this article to list more examples of covert and overt prejudice; therefore it is essential to point out that this article has not exemplified or mentioned the deeply insidious prejudice of abuse, violence, false detention, apprehension or the wilful thwarting of learning which happens at least once in every single black person’s life in the UK.