Just because you grew up poor does not mean that you didn't benefit from privileges awarded to whites. Admitting that these privileges exist doesn't mean that

Just because you grew up poor does not mean that you didn't benefit from privileges awarded to whites. Admitting that these privileges exist doesn't mean that individual whites had an easy time. "You will hear a lot of crap about African-Americans and Females having a hard time..." Your argument, in a nut, seems to be that barriers to learning are low, and therefore, blacks and women had opportunities to learn, they just chose otherwise, and the consequences are on them. Of course, even if true, this is simplistic. You see why, right? Your sum total of success is due to more than learning how to program in a basement. It has to do with mentoring along the way, finding peers, being seen as able to do things. If you're in the minority (within discipline), it's harder. If the minority has the odds stacked against it in the wider society (and we're not arguing about that, right?), then things get harder still. It's hard to see why this is controversial.