<i>If, on the other hand, you genuinely want to understand what &quot;white male privilege&quot; is all about, you should look at how women of racial minorities fared in your home town, or other similar towns.</i><p>Such an analysis would not yield the results I believe you expect. Most of the minority families from my town have been very successful -- they put high demands and expectations on their children, worked hard, etc. The world didn&#x27;t <i>expect</i> them to fail, as it does with &quot;white trash&quot; males, and their potential was theirs to make. In no universe am I saying they excelled because of affirmative action or anything of the sort -- they worked for everything they got, and <i>earned it</i> -- but society isn&#x27;t predetermined to expect failure from them.<p>I grew up a poor white male in unfortunate circumstances. Nothing was expected of me (I often joked about wishing I was Jewish, because then I&#x27;d have expectations), and every door was shut. There were no advantages. I remember one particular malignant teacher saying to another, after I had left a room, &quot;water flows to its own level&quot;. And of the white males who I grew up around, most did menial jobs and cycled in and out of unemployment, some went to jail, etc. 90%+, roughly, still live in that small town.<p>The whole white male privilege thing seems to be a classic divergence between the median, and the mean. A small percentage of spectacularly successful white males pull the mean up, while the median lies in the masses of people living miserable lives. But the masses have to suffer and acknowledge their privilege because of the mean.<p>Or maybe we should simply discard with the whole premise of trying to simplify large groups on traits.