I certainly agree that the N-word is in an entirely different league when it comes to slurs, even if “white privilege” were to be granted status as a slur. It’s a really ineffectual slur even if it tries to be one: “Oh yeah? Well you’re just a possessor of white privilege!!!” Just not very biting or very raw, not very dismissive or hateful. But if every time someone picked up a dry noodle, they tried to stab me with it, I would still be forced to conclude that noodles are (used as) a type of weapon — while still being glad that it wasn’t a knife. And being stabbed by enough fettuccine could really start to hurt.

I think we sort of agree that Tim was arguing about what the reasonable expectations were upon hearing the phrase “white privilege”. But I think he based a lot of the argument on a mistaken presumption, and then didn’t develop the other part enough to end up with a compelling case.

I agree that Tim also spent a fair bit of space arguing that white privilege exists and is significant. I wasn’t really addressing that, because I kind of naively thought that the title of the article highlighted the main point of the article. For the record, I think “how big of a privilege is ‘white privilege’” is a tremendously important question, and it frustrates me immensely that answers to this in different areas are often difficult to come by — how do we know how to fix problems or in what order to fix them if we don’t know how big they are? (It isn’t a simple matter of tallying things by race because that doesn’t tell you the cause of the disparities. It’s very hard to fix problems when you don’t understand the causes.) But anyway it’s a HUGE area, and I didn’t intend to write a multi-volume treatise, so I was limiting myself to the logic used to make what I interpreted as the main point.