Asking yourself whether you have “privilege” is the wrong question. Anyone able to read this post is, by definition, “privileged.” The question which needs to be asked is “what are you going to do with whatever privilege you do have?” We don’t have a choice of what we are born into, but we do have a choice of what we do with it. This isn’t just being pedantic about these terms. Focusing on what privileges we each do or do not have is a way of dividing people. That is how poor whites were convinced to support slavery, and today to continue racism, even though it is against their own rational self-interest. Even if a white is just as poor as his Black neighbor, he can feel “privileged” because he is white. Focusing on what you do with privilege can unite people. Because focusing on what even poor people can do by combining their privileges is so powerful, those who have the most privileges in our society try to suppress it. That is why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed while supporting a strike of public workers, about to launch his multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign. That is why the 1954 movie Salt of the Earth, based on a real strike (with the real strikers in the cast), was blacklisted by Hollywood and the US government. Watch that movie, especially Esperanza’s speech, and you might understand what I am getting at.