I’ve had this problem with it since the early 00′s when I first encountered the word. It was in the context of “black people can’t call the police when they’re in trouble; that’s a privilege white people have” and I was like… how is something that everyone should have a privilege? In natural English, privilege either means something that is given to you because you earned it (”being on the honor roll is a privilege”), with the implication that it can be taken from you when you no longer earn it, or it means something you are unfairly given (”he was born a child of privilege”). Only in the unique lingo of the left can it ever be used to mean “something everyone should have that is unfairly denied to some.”
I think we should use the term “advantage” instead. Advantage is neutral. You can have an advantage for good reasons, bad reasons, or morally neutral reasons. “Our advantage is that we understand friendship and the bad guys don’t!” “If we steal the plans we’ll have an advantage over our competitors.” “The fact that our city is on a hill gives us the advantage over our would-be invaders.”
It is a white advantage that the cops will actually show up when we call for help and usually won’t make matters worse. It is a white advantage that when we accuse someone of a crime, we are more likely to be believed if the accused is a person of color, even if our claim is ridiculous. It is a white advantage that all the band-aids match our skin color more or less. The first should be granted to everyone, the second should be granted to no one and the third should either be granted to everyone or no one (what about bandaids with artistic patterns on them? give up on matching skin color and just put Monet on a bandaid!) Calling all of these things “privilege” turns off the people who aren’t already steeped in SJ lingo, even if they’d be on our side otherwise (I have been anti-racist my whole life but when I first heard that I was privileged for being able to call the cops when I was in trouble, I was outraged, because in natural English that means I don’t deserve to be able to call the cops or that I deserve it but only because I did something special to earn it. It took a while to wrap my head around the idea that the word means something different in that context.)
“Privilege” is a word loaded with the concepts of deserving and undeserving, and never should have been used to mean “things given to the dominant class that are not permitted for the oppressed class.” We should have been using advantage all along.
