White privilege

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
White privilege: Unpacking the Invisible knapsack by Peggy McIntosh

This article is now considered a ‘classic’ by anti-racist educators. It has been used in workshops and classes throughout the United States and Canada for many years. While people of color have described for years how whites benefit from unearned privileges, this is one of the first articles written by a white person on the topics.

Here is Peggy McIntosh discussing how she came to the understandings she writes about:

Tim Wise, another sociologist, applies this concept to the 2008 election in his article, "White privilege, white entitlement and the 2008 election." Here is an excerpt:
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
And here is Eddie Murphy addressing the same issue in a comedy sketch from SNL