Yes, I completely agree. And I agree regardless of the type of privilege we’re talking about. There are surely a number of ways I'm privileged over you. And likely an equal number of ways you're privileged over me. One of those is that you're white. But it’s only one.

When we talk, it helps if we're conscious of that interplay of priviliges and respond accordingly. But even if our set of privileges aligned perfectly, even if we were siblings for example, we still wouldn't know what it felt like to be the other. We'd still have blind spots and get things wrong. We'd still have to rely on empathy to get to a point where we understood each other.

This is why I think the idea that the only way to understand a thing is to be directly affected by it is wrong. It undervalues empathy and intelligence. I think DiAngelo lacks both these things 😅 which is why I think her book fails so badly. But the colour of our skin doesn't create some unbridgeable gulf between us or our ability to understand each other. And I think if a white person made a real effort to understand racism, they could absolutely talk about it well.