A girl I went to high school with—she’s an old woman now, just as I’m an old man—recently posted a meme supposed to be about white privilege that said something along the lines of never having had any such privilege and having had to work for everything she has. I’m sure she’s had to work to get and maintain her stuff over the years, but her meme reveals a common misunderstanding of the notion of “white privilege” as it arises in the context of racism—that is, money and the finer things are not what white privilege is about.

We poor and middle-class whites have a difficult time understanding our privilege in any context other than that of socio-economic status. The reason for this is that the kind of privilege we have is invisible—which is the nature of privilege rightly understood—we incorrectly relate any reference to privilege to wealth, to some silver-spoon-in-mouth quality and ease of life to which our wallets and our purses and our bank accounts reveal we weren’t born.

So, yes, my high school classmate has worked hard now for over forty years, and I hope that she lives as comfortable a life as it’s possible for poor and middle-class whites to live these days. But even if she isn’t comfortable or even close to it—living hand-to-mouth and paycheck-to-paycheck—she’s still white and still privileged in these United States of America.

Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines privilege:

Her invisible white privilege is in the things that are absent from her life, the things to which she is immune—that she probably hasn’t been pulled over by the police for driving in a neighborhood that for a variety of merely physical appearances is obviously not her neighborhood; that she has probably not been followed around a department store by wary clerks and store security guards who suspect that she’s most likely intending to drop a few items into that big bag of hers; that “the talk” she might have had with her parents before she ventured out into the world on her own probably was about “the birds and the bees”—i.e., sex—and not about how to behave around unfamiliar white people in general and the police in particular. That these things—and things like them—are absent from her life, that she is, in a sense, immune to them, is white privilege. That she can drive most anywhere she wants to go without being stopped is a privilege. That she can shop until she drops with nothing more than the ever-present security cameras on her—as they are on us all—is a privilege. That she can interact with the police on equal footing, if she ever has to interact with them at all, is a privilege.

And all of these privileges are the product of racial whiteness.