Aaron Boyd
1 min readSep 20, 2020

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Stop. Calling. It. Privilege.

Being able to walk down the street without fear of getting shot is not a privilege.

Being able to call 911 without worrying the police will inexplicably arrest you is not a privilege.

Receiving adequate healthcare regardless of where you live is not a privilege.

Being treated with the bare minimum level of respect all human beings deserve is not a privilege.

"Privilege" implies the individual is receiving some form of special treatment or unearned benefits above and beyond what the average person would receive. And while this is applicable to many forms of white privilege, in the vast majority of cases, the problem isn't white people being treated better, it's people of color being treated worse.

When you casually toss the term "privilege" around without distinguishing between "benefitting Group A" and "Depriving Group B of its inalienable rights", you don't just needlessly muddy the waters with sloppily ambiguous language, you lower the baseline expectations we all have of society by conflating human rights and trivial benefits.

The solution to this problem isn't to train the police to treat whites the way they do blacks, it's to get them to treat blacks the way they treat whites.

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