Discussing white 'advantage' doesn't diminish white working-class' struggles

Last week I wrote about something my father, who is white, has said for years: when many white Americans hear the phrase "white privilege," they respond by listing all the ways their lives have been hard.

But if you talk about "white advantage," the conversation changes. Advantage is measurable. It doesn’t erase suffering. It simply acknowledges that race still tilts the system.

After that column ran, readers reached out asking me to elaborate.

To understand why, we have to go back to the beginning of the American story.

Early in colonial America, poor Europeans and enslaved Africans sometimes recognized that they shared a common predicament. They ran away together. They rebelled together. For a brief moment in our history, working people across color lines sometimes saw each other as allies rather than enemies.

That possibility deeply unsettled the people who held power. So over time, colonial elites built a system designed to prevent that unity. Europeans were given small advantages — permission to carry weapons, positions in militias, small measures of authority over enslaved Africans. At the same time, racial contempt was deliberately cultivated between the groups.

Racism itself became a tool of political control. The wedge worked. In many ways, it still does.

White communities across America are hurting. Factories have closed. Life expectancy for many working-class Americans has fallen. Addiction and suicide have devastated entire towns.

Acknowledging white advantage doesn’t deny any of that.

It simply says this: if two people walk into the same job interview with the same resume, race still affects the outcome. If two families try to build wealth across generations, race still shapes the odds. Social scientists have measured this for years. In a well-known study, Princeton sociologist Devah Pager sent out identical resumes to employers.

Applicants with traditionally white-sounding names received far more callbacks than those with Black-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same.

Suffering and advantage can exist at the same time.

My father understood something many activists forget: language can open conversations, or it can shut them down.

For decades he worked with thousands of men — mostly white — helping them confront trauma and take responsibility for their actions. He saw how quickly people shut down when they feel their suffering is being dismissed.

That’s the predicament. The reality of racial advantage is undeniable. But the language we use to describe it sometimes pushes away the very people who need to be part of the solution.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson understood this better than anyone. His Rainbow Coalition was built on a simple insight: racism has long been the oldest political wedge in America. Divide working people by race and those in power stay secure. But if working people across racial lines ever truly unite, the coalition would be powerful enough to transform the country.

The opposite of racism isn’t just tolerance. It’s solidarity. Our history shows both possibilities. At times we have been divided by race so completely that we could barely see our shared interests. At other moments — Reconstruction, the labor movement, the Civil Rights era — we have glimpsed what multiracial democracy can look like.

That history should give us hope. Because if racism was built to divide us, it can also be dismantled.

Jackson spent a lifetime trying to show us what comes next. When working people finally refuse the wedge — when we stand together from union halls to houses of worship, from big cities to small towns — the coalition that emerges will be stronger than the politics that have kept us apart for generations.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.