"In common parlance, privilege is defined as rights or immunities granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor. Although it retains that meaning, privilege has a more specific use in the recent literature, where it denotes the advantages held by a dominant group in society. In this view, privilege is the flip side of oppression. Whereas oppression confines and limits one's opportunities, privilege confers power, dominance, resources, and rewards. Contemporary scholarship argues that everyone is shaped by some combination of interacting social categories (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation), and everyone experiences (on both the individual and collective levels) varying degrees of privilege and oppression depending on her or his social location or place in society. These scholars argue that examining oppression reveals only half of the picture; privilege and oppression operate hand in hand, and one cannot exist without the other...
Although individuals benefit from privilege, some scholars say that the privilege is based on the person's group membership or social location rather than on anything he or she has done as an individual. In this view, privilege is not about people's qualities as individuals but instead about the ways in which social systems shape their lives regardless of their intentions. Privilege is systemic and systematic, they say, so even the most committed White antiracist activist receives privilege based on race; it is not something one can choose to relinquish. Although the United States is often assumed to be a meritocracy, this perspective challenges the idea that privilege is a reward for merit or achievement. Rather, it sees privilege as revealing that U.S. society has not achieved a level playing field and that inequality is still widespread." -- Schaefer, R.T. (2008). Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society. SAGE Reference.