Excellent post. A couple of things, I think the problem, however, with the word combo of "white male privilege" - or even just the less complex "white privilege", is evident in this thread, you have a lot of clearly well-educated liberals - who fail to grasp the above - even when its spelled out. For you "privilege" gets its meaning from its relation whiteness and race, for others I think privilege acquires meaning through class even when clearly being inserted in relation to race. It easily becomes (mis)understood a story about absolute social status - instead of relative. But lets assume you can establish a dominant meaning to "white male privilege" through interactions with disenfranchised unemployed Caucasian males, and navigate away from the "let us compare sufferings" narrative, you make them realize that their Caucasian male suffering is in fact "universal". What then? They are failures in every sense of the word, despite race and gender privilege, despite the system rigged in their favor, they are poor and unemployed, they are not in control of their life. They cannot imagine another future through the vocabularies we provide them with (I say "we" because I work in education), problem of alternatives heightened in a two-party system, in an economic system that is driven by accumulation by dispossession. Certainly vocabularies such as "white male privilege" will not spur dreams of alternative futures. There is no common denominator which around all those who are disenfranchised could rally, class is subjugated under gender and race or made irrelevant. My point is that you are unlikely to form solidarity through a white male privilege discourse, and even if you would do not offer any alternative discourses of moral imagination to the "universal conditions" of poverty and unemployment. I think very few people are willing to take the conversation there as it probably leads to a necessity to question certain truths even more sedimented than racial inequality.
