"Privilege" has just become a way to knock someone else down. It was supposed to makes us think, it's having the opposite affect. And it applies to everyone. You could be a mixed race transgender lesbian wheelchair-using autistic blind deaf mute with a heroin addition and you'd still have "wasn't in a car accident" privilege.

I read an article about privilege in the animal/evolutionary sense. Privilege is anything your parents give you other than just your existence and genes. So fish don't really get any privilege, they're squirted into a cloud and abandoned. Baby birds have privilege in getting fed for a few weeks before having to fend for themselves. Mammals have milk privilege. Predators which learn skills from their parents have privilege. Any time privilege comes into the equation it means your survival isn't just about how fit YOU are, it's about how much your parents helped you. A tiger cub may be genetically more fit than another but if its parent did a shittier job of teaching it to hunt (because the parent was injured, or died early, or there just wasn't much prey around when it was learning) it will be disadvantaged.

Humans have more privilege than almost any other animal. We invest 18 years, about a quarter of an average human life, in helping our offspring. This means that in humans, unlike fish, your relative success is in a large part nothing to do with you. Your individual skills, achievements and outcomes are still largely driven by your efforts but when comparing a person to another you have to take privilege into account. E.g. You might be great at crochet, that's your achievement, well done. If you're the best in the world at it you have to wonder how many other people had the opportunity to invest so much time in a hobby that's generally unprofitable, and what privilege might've contributed to your relative success?

This is an important concept to understand and recognize. There are genuinely wealthy people who are given businesses as teens and still believe they "did it all themselves" and other people just didn't try as hard.

Of course NONE of this has to do with "checking your privilege" when posting a motivational meme, or with the state of perpetual victim-hood some people are clinging to.

I find a good response to "Check your privilege" is "I did. It's going fine, thanks for asking."