Privilege, like almost everything else in politics, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more 'privileged': a tenured female academic of colour, or a lower middle-class or working-class man with only a high school education or less? I think the academic would have some difficulty persuading the man that he is 'privileged' over her simply because he's white and male.

My point is simply this: if we look at 'privilege' solely through the prisms of race and sex without also looking at class, we get a distorted image. I believe the academic buzz-word for this is 'intersectionality'.