Most of the focus today is on what’s called “systemic racism” which is a real thing and is based more on structural disparities associated with skin color rather than skin color in and of itself. For example, wealth in Black families undercut by redlining, etc. These disparities are not only real, they’re large, and they’re not shrinking.
We can (and should) talk about these things. But inverting that, and talking about “white privilege” isn’t either sound nor effective. “White privilege” includes, for example, the fact that the median Black person makes about the same income as a White person at the 33rd percentile of income. Put differently, a white person enjoys “white privilege” because there was a statistically better chance they’d be born into a higher income family. (Specifically, a 66% chance of having an income higher than 50% of Black households.) That makes sense from an academic point of view, to people with college degrees. It comes across as complete gibberish to my grandmother in law and some of my wife’s aunts, who are solidly in the bottom 1/3 of white incomes, and spent much of their lives below even that. The counter-factual hypothetical the income distribution of white people in general is meaningless to them. All they hear is that most Black people make more money than they do, yet they’re the ones being accused of having “white privilege.”
The problem is exactly the issue of applying generalizations to specific people. If you explained the statistics to my grandmother in law, that white people on average make significantly more money than Black people on average, she would get it. She didn’t go to college, but that’s within her ambit. It’s where you take the generalization about white people, and tell her as an individual white person that she’s somehow “privileged” despite growing up dirt poor that you’re going to lose her.
The lessons we 90s kids learned in school were the right ones. Don’t generalize about people based on their skin color. These new ideas from college professors are wrong ideas.
I mean, brainwashed HR drones trying to teach DiAngelo's nonsense is one level of problem. But dig deeper, turn over a few more rocks and the structural nature of the problem becomes apparent. It's not just white privilege that's a wrong and harmful idea coming out of universities, there are lots of such ideas, and there is absolutely nothing that can stop it. No mechanisms, no social conventions, nothing. Professors can just make up junk their entire lives and be continuously rewarded for it.
The consensus on Hacker News has always been that we shouldn't, that any attempt to do so is a slippery slope that leads to tyranny, because free speech must be absolute and non-negotiable, regardless of content, truth or consequence. "I may object to what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," is the thought-terminating cliche often employed in the myriad other threads where free speech becomes a topic.
If this thread were about controversial right-wing speech, you would be shouted down as a bigot and a fascist for even suggesting that ideas can be "wrong" and "harmful." You would probably be one of the people doing the shouting down, as you've argued for free speech absolutism in other threads, and against deplatforming, cancel culture and other "leftist" and "SJW" attacks on free speech.
If it's not a problem when it's anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, racists or QAnon plotting a coup, it shouldn't be a problem here.