Well, here's where things get tricky, because it's difficult to get someone to understand something they don't notice. This is typically what is meant by the t

Well, here's where things get tricky, because it's difficult to get someone to understand something they don't notice. This is typically what is meant by the term "white privilege". What is actually meant is that someone has a different set of experiences, so they are comparatively blind to experiences that are common to people of other races. This is a very common phenomenon. Most people when they are growing up think that their experiences are universal. That the way their family works is the way everyone else's works, and so on. It's only when they get older that they realize that maybe their experiences have been abnormal, and also that experiences different from one's own are possible, perhaps even commonplace (such as growing up with divorced parents, growing up poor vs. rich, etc.) This is extremely true when it comes to race, because until recently the experiences of people of color have often not been very well publicized. But they absolutely do. If you're black, or brown, or a muslim, your experiences in the developed world are going to be different from those of a white non-muslim. You're going to get stopped for "random" searches when flying more often. You're going to be stopped by the police while driving more often. Your interactions with police will be more tense and less cordial. And so on and so on. These are just facts. In the US whites actually use illegal drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks. But blacks are stopped more often on suspicion of drug activity, they are prosecuted more often, and they receive much harsher sentences. That's why despite the lower rate of drug use and the lower population, the number of blacks in prison for drug offenses is vastly higher than for whites. If you're white, drugs might as well be legal, as long as you're not transporting kilos of them around. If you're black, you are more than ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug use than if you're white, much more. That's systemic racism and injustice, and that's just one tiny example. There was a study where job applicants sent in resumes. The names on the resumes were changed, some had "black sounding" names, some had "white sounding" names. The resumes with the white names had a much higher rate of callbacks than those with the black names. There are many, many more examples. To pull one from the headlines. Consider the examples of two different athletes: Ryan Lochte and Colin Kaepernick. Ryan Lochte committed a crime, and the general sentiment among many is "boys will be boys" (despite him being over 30). Kaepernick exercised his 1st amendment rights to make a statement against police brutality, and he has received a torrent of death threats and insults, including many using the n-word. If that doesn't tell you that racism is alive and well in the western world, then I don't know what to tell you. Yes, we've made progress on racism. Yes, being an open, avowed racist often results in swift negative consequences. But that does not define the boundaries of the problem of racism, there is still a lot of very difficult work to be done, our world is far, far removed from one where racism is no longer an issue.