1. That’s not what that word means

Privilege is defined as a special right, or an unearned advantage or opportunity, an extra benefit that goes above and beyond what should be expected. Yet many of the advantages commonly cited as examples of White privilege, such as being presumed competent at your work or being able to enter public spaces without fear or suspicion, are not special rights, and are not things one should have to earn. In fact, most of the examples reflect a basic standard of civility that should be afforded to every member of a just and well-functioning society. These are not luxuries, they should be considered the baseline.

For those who face regular discrimination, these basic expectations may feel like a luxury, but that does not make them so. Just as a starving man might devour a stale cracker as if it were a gourmet meal, deprivation distorts perception. But at the end of the day, a stale cracker is still just a stale cracker. And calling basic common courtesies “privileges” simply diverts critical attention away from the real villain: racial discrimination.

Now I realise that White privilege theory aimed to make racial injustices visible to those who do not experience them. However, mischaracterising those injustices does not clarify the problem, it makes it easier to dismiss. I am not privileged, you are being discriminated against. Let just us call it what it is.

To better understand White privilege, let’s consider the life of Chelsea Clinton. She attended Stanford, Oxford and Columbia universities, all elite institutions where legacy status and family connections open doors. Despite her average grades, she secured a role at NBC News immediately after graduation, earning a reported salary of $700,000. Her 2010 wedding to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky reportedly cost more than $3 million and took place at a lavish estate with high-profile guests and extensive security. She now lives in a $10 million Manhattan apartment, nearly 465 square metres of prime real estate with sweeping views of Madison Square Park. And, in her spare time, she appears for speaking engagements where she shares her views on women’s empowerment, climate action, and the importance of recognising and dismantling White privilege.

This level of advantage and hypocrisy is not available to everyone, and in this case, the advantage hardly seems earned. This is what true White privilege looks like. And to the thousands of homeless and hungry White people who sleep rough in wealthy cities across the free world, being called privileged is as insulting as it is inaccurate. Not all White people have it easy, just as not all Black people face systemic discrimination.

2. It lowers the bar for everyone

When we start referring to basic respectful treatment as privilege, we are, in effect, lowering the bar for what everyone can expect from society. When access to the most fundamental societal opportunities is framed as an “unearned luxury”, it naturally follows that whatever discrimination is being faced by the “unprivileged” must be the baseline. And once this new baseline is established, it stops being questioned—it seeps into daily life and becomes accepted as “just how things are”. This reinforces the injustice when, at every opportunity, we should be challenging it, and calling it out by name.

To understand this logic, we need to go back to the 1960s, when psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson ran a study in a California elementary school. They informed teachers that a certain cohort of students was likely to show strong academic growth—though the students in question had simply been randomly selected. By the end of the year, those “special” students had shown greater improvement than their peers, not because they were gifted as claimed, but because the teachers had unknowingly changed how they interacted with them—offering more encouragement, more patience, and more opportunity. The students responded positively to that treatment, and the belief that they were academically advanced became reality (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). While the original study has been criticised, its core results have been replicated.

This phenomenon is known as the Pygmalion Effect. It demonstrates how people tend to reflect the expectations placed on them. This dynamic could also apply when common courtesy is framed as privilege. In that context, people would naturally stop expecting to be treated with dignity—and worse still, they would begin to accept its absence. Over time, this lowered expectation would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Spoiler: it may already have.

3. Poor is the new Black

White privilege theory has been instrumental in highlighting racial disparities that once shaped the social landscape, and the idea that white individuals navigate society with fewer barriers to opportunity. But in recent decades, many Black people have gained visibility, leadership, and institutional influence—challenging the assumption that racial barriers remain intact.

In Australia, this shift is evidenced by the 141% increase in Indigenous bachelor’s degree enrolments between 2008 and 2020 (Universities Australia, 2022), the growing presence of First Nations people in executive and leadership roles (Coalition of Peaks, 2025), and the rapid expansion of Indigenous-owned businesses, which are projected to contribute over $53 billion to the national economy in the next two decades (Indigenous Business Australia, 2025). These examples represent a measurable redistribution of access, agency, and influence that white privilege theory was built to critique.

However, while racial equity has seen positive progress, a more insidious form of inequality has taken hold. With the steady decline of the middle class, marked by the cost-of-living crisis and a widening gap between the rich and the poor, significant hardship is now more predictably determined by economic status than by race.

Furthermore, with emerging systems like digital ID and social credit scoring systems poised for implementation, these are likely to further equalise how individuals are tracked, evaluated, and classified—potentially removing any residual racial disparities in public treatment.

But these new systems won’t erase the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. If anything, they will exacerbate it. These technologies will likely be disproportionately applied to the working class and economically vulnerable, whose reliance on public services will subject them to behavioural scoring, compliance monitoring, and algorithmic control.

In contrast, wealthier people will remain largely beyond the reach of these mechanisms because they often occupy positions of influence within the very institutions that develop and deploy them. Today, wealth and economic power do more to shape societal inequality than race does—making white privilege theory less relevant to the realities we now face.

4. It shifts blame from systems to the individual

White Privilege theory was developed to highlight structural racial advantage, but its public and institutional interpretation has often distorted that purpose. Rather than prompting scrutiny of the systems responsible for inequality, privilege has frequently been reduced to a binary used to categorise people as either “privileged” or “oppressed” based solely on race.

This interpretation shifts attention away from the institutions responsible for discrimination and redirects it in the form of personal attacks toward the privileged, who are often just as powerless to influence those systems (Cohn, 2020).

In institutional settings, particularly within education and in the implementation of diversity policy, the theory is frequently taken up through symbolic gestures, including statements of awareness, training modules, or public acknowledgements that do little to actually challenge the structures that sustain inequality. These gestures can create the appearance of progress through passive compliance, while leaving the discriminatory systems largely untouched (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Vass, 2017).

Worse still, the language that has grown around White Privilege theory, especially phrases like “check your privilege”, now functions as a public reprimand. It promotes guilt, defensiveness, and division rather than fostering solidarity and collective action.

By turning a theory developed to expose institutional advantage into a personal indictment, the misapplication of white privilege theory fractures the possibility of coalitions and undermines positive social reform.

5. White privilege justifies discrimination

Over the past few decades, governments have introduced reforms aimed at dismantling the structural inequalities that White Privilege theory sought to expose. Legislation such as the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 and Queensland’s Human Rights Act 2019 have helped remove systemic barriers and promote fairer access to education, employment, and public services. In many respects, the theory’s primary concerns have now been acknowledged and addressed through law and policy.

Yet some government policies now risk overcorrecting. Under the banner of equity, the Queensland Government now mandates recruitment practices that introduce new forms of discrimination. The Recruitment and Selection Directive 07/23, supported by the Recruitment and Selection Summary Guide – October 2023, mandates that:

“All recruitment and selection processes must actively progress equity and diversity in employment for diversity target groups” (Queensland Public Sector Commission, 2023, p. 3).

The preferred diversity groups outlined in the directive include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, culturally and linguistically diverse people, people with disability, and women in leadership roles (Queensland Public Sector Commission, 2023, p. 2).

While intended to correct historical disadvantage, this policy prioritises diversity targets over merit criteria, reducing equity to a numbers-driven exercise where ticking boxes overrides selecting the most capable applicant.

Recent recruitment advertisements for mid-level Queensland Government positions have explicitly identified young people and women as preferred diversity groups, illustrating how such designations may be used to circumvent existing anti-discrimination laws. Although it is unlawful to advertise positions on the basis of age or gender, by nominating these cohorts as “preferred”, departments can effectively engage in age-based or gender-based selection under the guise of diversity policy.

This creates new opportunity barriers by discounting individuals who are not part of the targeted groups, and making it less likely that the best-qualified person will be appointed to a position—an example of which would be the person responsible for implementing these diversity recruitment mandates.

Moreover, although diverse groups may offer broader creative perspectives in team environments, they also face greater challenges in cohesion and conflict resolution, requiring closer supervision. A meta-analysis of 615 studies confirms that diversity frequently disrupts team dynamics, especially in roles that depend on trust, shared values, and tight coordination (Wallrich et al., 2024).

Merit-based selection remains the fairest and most reliable way to ensure capability, experience, and suitability align with the demands of the role. The purpose of equity should be to remove obstacles to opportunity, not to address one form of exclusion by imposing another.