No I don't dispute racial inequality. It's an undeniable statistical phenomenon - with many contributing factors. Racism is surely one of those factors.

To the extent that "white privilege" exists - just like the extent of civil society strength in different communities - it seems like the problem isn't that some white people enjoy better lives (on a variety of metrics).

I think the phrase itself is problematic, because it assumes that no one should be granted the kind of basic human decency we refer to when we talk about "white privilege."

But no one should be dragged out of their car. No one should be deprived of owning a home. No one should have to worry they'll be targeted unfairly by teachers, employers, the police, etc. These kinds of things we list as privileges are really more like base-line human dignity.

The problem is that not everyone gets to enjoy these kinds of privileges, or does not have the same chance to attain them.

I've seen a weird reflexive viewpoint that it's "white privilege" that's the problem, not that other non-white people may be deprived of this privilege.

The solution you might suggest if you have this latter view is to deprive all people of prosperity.

Here's a charged example: we know that proportionally, more black people are killed by police than white people. That's a problem and it seems likely that racism accounts for some of the additional deaths. We can't really know how many - but one solution to this lack of equity would be to encourage the police to kill more white people so that the numbers are proportional. That would eliminate the "white privilege" of being less likely to be killed by police.

But it wouldn't help anyone of any race who will be killed by police. It would increase police violence. We could have equity by having the police kill 10% of people across the board. No more white privilege! Yay?

We have a police brutality problem, just like we have a poverty problem. We could make these problems more equitably distributed without actually helping people of any race. Focusing on the idea that some people have more prosperous lives should not come at the cost of ignoring how to improve the lives of people on the margins.

Rights, human decency and even prosperity are not zero-sum.

The question of who is actually depriving non-whites most brutally affected by inequality is also complicated. There's plenty of blame to go around, from how are school system works, to how our government creates policy, and a dozen other factors. Racism certainly plays a part, but it's not the whole picture. If we only focus on racism, we miss out on other, less intractable factors that we can address head on.