One report noted that white students often react to in-class discussions about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging from outright hostility to a "wall of silence". This privilege contrasts with the separation of Indigenous Australians from other indigenous peoples in southeast Asia.

This ranges from preferential treatment in public places like parks and supermarkets to the treatment they receive from authorities.Over the past 40 years, there has been less formal discrimination in America; the inequality in wealth between racial groups however, is still extant. Samuel from black education campaign group, Re-Rooted, thinks it's all about taking small steps: "If every person was to go out and teach one other person about what they'd learned about white privilege then we'd be one step closer to having an equal world. The police killing of George Floyd in the US city of Minneapolis in 2020 ignited a wave of protests across the globe and intense discussions of anti-black racism. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting "class privilege" and "white privilege".

The term is used in discussions focused on the mostly hidden benefits that white people possess in a society where racism is prevalent and whiteness is considered normal, rather than on the detriments to people who are the objects of racism. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman is a critique of unexamined white privilege in the Australian feminist movement. And it captures the experience of structural racism many inhabitants of France’s social-housing neighbourhoods have shared.Because of this, academic and societal ideas about race have tended to focus solely on the disadvantages suffered by racial minorities, overlooking the advantageous effects that accrue to whites. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Ms Israelah, whose social media profile says that she is Filipino, shared a photo of herself and the officer smiling together as she flashed the card to the camera. Conservative author Shelby Steele believes that the effects of white privilege are exaggerated, saying that blacks may incorrectly blame their personal failures on white oppression, and that there are many "minority privileges": "If I'm a black high school student today. Scholar João Ferreira Duarte, in his jointedly written Europe in Black and White, has examined colonialism in relation to white privilege, suggesting its legacy continues "to imprint the privilege of whiteness onto the new map of Europe", but also "sustain the political fortification of Europe as a hegemonic white space".