If you are the member of a privileged group AND call yourself progressive

[ChaoticTrilby]

229. No. I don't think so.

As I see it, privilege isn't something that can be measured as a "quantity" and privileges cannot be tallied up. A white male heterosexual poor person (who we'll call Person A for convenience) has white, male, and heterosexual privilege. However, he also lacks money/class privilege. A black middle class person (Person B) has class privilege over the aforementioned poor person, but lacks white (and possibly male, depending on gender) privilege.

What this means for them both varies in society, depending on time and place. In a modern context, in a racially tolerant area, the lack of money/class would likely make things much more difficult for Person A to find a job/not deal with police discrimination/etc. than it would for Person B, who would still face difficulties but of a more psychological sort as a result of historical racism. In an area where racism runs rampant, this situation would naturally change and Person B would even meet more difficulties. If we go back to the 1950's, you could expect Person B to have to deal with an even greater number of difficulties as well as the fact that he/she would have to live in fear of being lynched while Person A would not. Compounding that issue would be the fact that, in earlier times, it would have been even easier for Person A to find employment than for Person B to do so (assuming he/she either had to move away from their middle-class family or lost the occupation that kept them in the middle-class.) In other words, it's very complicated, and comparing privilege is not really the point here.

The privilege is always there, and it's important to acknowledge it, but it's often risky to try and say that one person has "more privilege" than another. Especially when it comes to hypothetical speaking. What we can agree on is that the most privileged person in the U.S. is the white, male, hetero-normative, rich person in a state of power. Quite a few former presidents, in other words. Interesting.

As much as I love the idea of a society in which one's skin color/ethnicity/sex/sexuality lends no privilege, we're still getting there. The most anyone can do is just acknowledge it and figure out how to fix the problem. For that, we need discussion. Calling someone thin-skinned for reacting to a slur is counter-productive in that sense, which is what the OP is calling out.