"How is this supposed to make you feel?" - I have no idea, and I certainly don't think that in your sorry state you owe a beer to anyone. However, I do think you should say to your fellow losers "I am sorry that you guys are forced play a harder game, and I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar."
Now we get down to it- It's really a call to action. We are both losers, but you want the guys at the winners' tables to buy you a beer first, because you had a harder time, and disregard the fact that you and I are both equally losers.
Of course feelings are important- The feeling you wish to elicit is guilt, not simply acknowledgement.
The call to action is the acknowledgment, not the beer or the guilt.
Getting white males, whether successful or not, to even say "yes, the system discriminates for us, regardless of outcomes" is such a huge barrier that their acknowledgment of the issue is the first thing that must happen before any kind of "fixing of the system" could happen.
Acknowledgement is useless and not actionable. The end goal of people who bring up privilege is to engender a sense of guilt over undeserved advantages, which then leads to resources flowing out of the guilty group.
So at our losers' table, you would ask the white winners to help you out over me, and over the other white guys at the losers' table, because we, the white losers, must have fucked up more to get here. The underprivileged losers are entitled to disproportionate aid from the winners.
Let's assume that this whole discussion really is about resource redistribution. I don't actually think so, but we can take that as a hypothetical.
A winner comes over to the losers bar, and you want him to give every loser, white or black, the same number of chips.
The problem is that after you all get your re-up, you get to go play at the white table again, and they go back to play at the black table again, which means that you have a way greater chance to not come back to the losers' bar.
Ideally, you'd make both games have the same probability distributions, and that might happen eventually, but until then, the underprivileged losers should get more resources to have similar outcomes.
What is the conversation about if not resource redistribution? Simple acknowledgment gets you what, exactly? Nothing.. There's obviously some desired action. That action is what, if not some kind of favoritism or balancing of scales?
In this simplistic example, it comes down to one party using guilt tactics to convince the other party to provide an advantage or a leg up, which necessitates working against their own interests. Guilt tactics are required because it's a social engineering goal; the total number of people at the losers' bar remains the same.
If you thought that simple acknowledgement has no subsequent results, you wouldn't have any issues with it. What it seems you are afraid of is that acknowledging that the games are rigged puts you on a slippery slope that will eventually lead you to gladly and voluntarily showing up at the losers' bar offering parts of your unfairly-won gains.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me and not realizing it- We seem to agree that the ultimate goal of conversations about privilege is to guilt the privileged group members into supporting members of underprivileged groups, ignoring the actual personal circumstances of the individuals.
No, I realize exactly what I am saying, and I am not agreeing with you.
What I am saying is: "Regardless of personal outcomes, whites and blacks are playing a game with a different probability distribution. That's a statistical fact. I want you to either acknowledge that it's a fact, or provide evidence that it is not. If you do agree that it's a fact, I want you to say 'I'm sorry you guys are playing a statistically rigged game', however, I don't want you to feel guilty and give up your shit."
Saying 'I am sorry' is not the same as feeling guilty. If you really object to the words 'I'm sorry' and can't fathom saying them and not feeling guilty, try saying 'it sucks that you guys are playing a statistically rigged game'. If the words "I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar" seem to imply to you that it's a promise to later feel guilty and give up some of your shit when you have some, it isn't. Certainly you can remember what it is like to be a loser while being a winner, and then do nothing to help current losers.
What you seem to be saying is: "Regardless of whether 'the black game is disadvantageous to the white game' is a fact or not, the reason anyone tells me that is because they want to elicit guilt and then proceed with resource redistribution, rebalancing and social engineering", and I think that's wrong.
Just like it is incorrect to say that there is a white/asian/indian-male-libertarian-programmer-hivemind on Hacker News, it is incorrect to state that everyone that makes the observation that I am making is there to elicit guilt and proceed with resource redistribution.
There is a philosophical maxim that states "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'." Interpret your opponents with sufficient charitability to believe that they are obeying this maxim, especially when they say "I am obeying that maxim."
