Reddit reviews How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures)

The wheelchair thing is an extreme example to be sure, though obviously when you're trying to get at a general concept within four sets of quotes everything is going to be :). I mean to connote a general resentment among the majority at any discussion of minority issues, and a tendency to believe that one's intention is the most important, regardless of whether they end up propagating narratives which disproportionately impact some groups. I still think that "privilege" is important as a concept because it gets at how something (like race, or sex, or any other status) which can be taken for granted not to be an issue by many people who are considered to be the "default," but still impact others.

So you wanted an example of constrained opportunity for minority groups, and I'd be happy to get into that. The general way we tend to conceive of this is that the only true barriers are formal legal ones or overt discrimination, and that's not necessarily true—studies have shown that landlords, employers, etc. are less likely to consider applicants with the same information and "black"-sounding names, police officers more likely during simulations to view an innocent object in the hands of a black individual as a gun and "shoot" them, etc. I really doubt that many of the people in these studies are overt bigots, yet they absolutely act as gatekeepers to opportunity for many.

But let's consider a society in which people may have been prevented in the past from entering certain institutions or holding power, but aren't overtly facing that treatment today. Would we expect things to be even now, everybody to have an equal shot?

Not really. Our opportunity is pretty dramatically affected by our social status, and that reaches into the past. The chance to be born in a middle-class neighborhood, have connections to make education and entering the workforce easier and imbue advantage there, and any number of other things may have a great deal to do with whether your parents and grandparents were allowed those privileges. Many ancestors of white people in the US were working-class in the early 1900s when that was the standard, and factory labor led to resources which were invaluable during the big college and manufacturing boom of the 1950s and onward. Black people, meanwhile, during the first half of the 20th century were targeted by Jim Crow laws intended to keep them in service and labor positions, overt racism, segregation which reduced access to resources and seats of power, a lack of legal representation and often a state whose institutions mobilized against them, and both institutionalized and private violence which targeted black-owned businesses for destruction, black people who were seen as stepping above their station for threats and violent reprisal, and which reinforced a deliberate view of black people as inherently servile, subservient, but potentially dangerous.

I strongly suggest this book to get into just how pervasive and destructive Jim Crow was, though the consequences of this type of behavior persist today, even in an era in which overt discrimination isn't nearly as common. Are many people prevented legally from getting a job due to some legal status? Not really. But many people's current position—living in disproportionate poverty in former urban centers, from which most who were renting couldn't escape after white flight to the suburbs and who are even now losing access to these areas through gentrification—is a direct result of some of the vilest racism in our country's history, which many living today experienced and which occurred only a few decades ago. We're talking about policies designed first overtly, then covertly, to maintain the disadvantage and constrain the opportunity of an entire group of people long after chattel slavery ended.