As soon as I finished reading Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” I emailed the article to my two roommates. Both of them are intelligent, liberal-minded…and white. I knew this article would intrigue them.

McIntosh states that “I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.” With this, my roommates disagreed. Believe it or not, they actually felt compelled to consider their white privilege at times. And to be honest, I agreed with them. We had discussed their experiences with white privilege numerous times. We had laughed about reverse-racism even more times than that.

It was when I noticed that this article had been published almost thirty years ago that I realized McIntosh’s was writing about whites at different point of time. I can not speak for many white adults because of my lack of interaction with them, but I can say that many millennials—at least the ones I know—are inclined to consider their advantages based on race, class, ethnicity and religion. This includes white millennials. This increase in conversation regarding white privilege probably has a lot to do with the rise of social media and the relevance of white privilege today.

I asked my roommates to scan the list citing the “Daily effects of white privilege.” Many of them they agreed with. Many of them they had never considered before. We laughed uncomfortably over the “flesh” color bandages. In the end, we agreed that much of white privilege is so discreet that it can hardly be noticed. Still, it exists. The question is how can we remove white privilege in society? How do we eliminate something that exists mostly in unconscious interactions? These are tough questions to answer. The first step in answering them is to understand the mechanisms of white privilege further.