Very eloquent and you make a lot of good points!
I really like how you unpack privilege, pointing out how being privileged in one aspect doesn’t mean you are in every aspect.
One way, I think, to help people accept the idea of “white privilege” would be to compare it to other types of privilege — to quantify it. Focusing more on what it is and how big it is is a good way to get around the instinctive refusal to accept that anything is amiss at all just because we’ve done away with Jim Crow laws.
E.g., “If nobody is racist, why are people who sound like minorities from their resume 2–2.5x less likely to get job interviews?” (Source: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews.) It’s awfully hard to be hit with that and refuse to acknowledge that there is any problem at all.
However, although you’ve provided extensive citations (this is wonderful!), some of the most astounding claims you make aren’t backed up by any citations. If you’re trying to establish trust with a skeptical audience (as you seem to be doing, though given how Medium works, it’s mostly going to show this to the choir, not the apostates), it’s important not to lie for a just cause, but to be forthright with how things actually are.
For instance, you state without citation that “white people earn $1.00 to every person of color’s $.60 for doing the same job”. This seemed high to me, as it’s way higher than the gender disparity. So I checked around and found nothing that indicates anything anywhere close; Payscale looked at its data for men (https://www.payscale.com/data/racial-wage-gap-for-men; why only men?!) and found that the rates were $0.87 for doing different jobs and $0.98 for doing the same job — and this is for black men only, which have the largest disparity. I’ve found other numbers other places (for different years), but always much smaller than what you cited. I’m not sure where your number comes from, but it is very suspicious.
Note: there _is_ very clear data that black people don’t get offered promotions at the same rates as white people, so at least a portion of the “doing different jobs” is in fact because of racial bias. But that’s not what you said.
You also state that
black people are incarcerated at a rate that is 5.1 times that of white people.[…] and its not because they’re committing more crimes than white people.
The link you give, however, goes not to a particular study that covers the rates, but an entire site with all sorts of prison statistics.
There are a lot of bad things to say about how the United States handles its criminal justice system, and there are plenty of cases of bias within the system. However, if you look at homicide rates of black men, they’re tragically high (though, thankfully, they’ve been declining; just not as much as in other communities): https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/05/03/homicide_overtime/
How is it possible that there is such a high rate of homicide among black men if it isn’t the case that black men are committing more murders, if not other crimes? (Hint: it’s not because black men are being killed by people of other races; there’s plenty of data on that too, and a majority of violence is intra-racial (see e.g. Table 1 in https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf).)
Now, there is also abundant evidence of unequal treatment in all parts of the justice system, but your claim just doesn’t seem right. At least it needs much better (specific!) support for the claim.
I haven’t checked everything else that seemed questionable to me (this already took too long), but please try to be a little more careful — or if I’ve made a mistake, please provide the citations that allow me to learn what it was!