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@starbreaker I guess we have to back to the basics of privilege, which is a general likelihood of enjoying the benefit of the doubt. This is hard to self-appreciate, because the benefit of the doubt mostly suppresses some negative behaviors towards you. So it isn't as much about how hard other people have it and more about how much harder it could have been for you with less privilege.

It's mostly easy to know when you didn't enjoy the benefit of the doubt, but it's harder to know when you actually did, because it's unlikely you would know about the potential negative behaviors if the circumstances were slightly different, and you can't redo the match anyway. But sometimes you can have a glimpse of it.

When I was in high school, we sat down on a river bench in a bourgeois neighborhood park on a summer night with a few of my very white friends. A municipal police patrol came to us and asked us bluntly if we were smoking pot. None of us had ever smoked as much as a cigarette, so we got a little cocky and in your face with the police officers. After a few regulatory warnings about marijuana, they left us alone, but I realized much later that it could have turned ugly if we hadn't all been white.

In this sense, allyship as I understand it is mostly about forcing ourselves to extend the benefit of the doubt to people from population who more generally don't enjoy it. I say "force ourselves" because we've been raised in a discriminatory society and so we have discriminatory reflexes that we have to overcome to extend this benefit of the doubt.

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