I haven't had time to read this whole thread but wanted to comment on this real quick.
That the whole "white privilege" discourse primarily discusses racial histories within the US (and loses coherence rapidly when transplanted to other climes to explain racial oppression) belies it's nature as a basically bourgeois-democratic nationalist ideology. It seems to have grown up among an academic class of democratists for the purpose of diverting any kind of a class response to institutionalized racism (which is a far better way of describing how the ruling class in different nations divide up the exploited than any notion of a "privilege" for some of the exploited) into guilt-based politics for the purposes of sidelining the class issue (for both whites and non-whites).
I have reservations about some of the white privilege talk but this is historically inaccurate. To the best of my knowledge the white privilege stuff in the US has its roots in writing by Theodore Allen and later Noel Ignatin. Allen wasn't an academic at least now when he was doing that writing, I don't know what he later did. Likewise for Ignatin, the key writing he did on in it was as a member of the Sojourner Truth Organization and not while working as an academic, and STO in general had a lot to say on all this. He later became an academic (real name Noel Ignatiev), but there seems to me to be little differences between the views developed in the STO days. So the academic thing seems like a red herring here and doesn't speak to the substance of this analysis or its shortcomings.
The working class fighting for itself as the working class has generally had an interest in eliminating great differences in how easily its members are exploited (demands of this sort serving the dual purpose of eliciting solidarity and deterring strike-breakers and/or general downward pressure on wages) (...) the experiences of discrimination felt by a class with no country that has been emigrating for work and/or forced into penal labor for engaging in various survival-based criminality for as long as its existed) helps that happen.
Okay, then when is a struggle a struggle of the working class fighting for itself? And when do those interests assert themselves in a causal way? It seems to me that smaller struggles of workers (struggles smaller than the sum total of the working class) often have interests that are contradictory including interests that can be bad for other workers. I think there's as much evidence of working class people preserving divisions and hierarchies in the working class historically as there is evidence of working class people breaking them down. So it seems to me that we can't just leave it to a general interest working class people have as working class people. The white skin privilege stuff is an effort to understand some ways that some of the time some working class people have played roles in preserving capitalism and preserving the even-more-subordinated roles of other sections of the working class within capitalism. Whatever its shortcomings it seems to me pretty undeniable that this happens sometimes and is a problem that it's worth trying to explain and respond to.
Edit: I've now skimmed most of the thread. I take the points about the actual practice of a lot of white privilege talk being a problem. Totally. Some times it's just like white people sittign around talking about their whiteness. I think one possible difference between the versions of white privilege analysis I know of and the idea of structural racism is that the privilege analysis claims that the privileged group have some interest in and act to uphold divisions in the working class - that they help uphold the structural racism and in doing so help uphold capitalism. The STO version of this is pretty clear I think that doing so is not in their class interests, but that people have multiple and contradictory interests.I think there's stuff worth arguing with or rejecting in some of the specfic writing within the privilege analysis stuff, but the basic point I think is pretty hard to reject and this is compatible a marxist idea about how capitalism operates/persists (and the Allen and Ignatin versions of this white privilege stuff was marxist). The working class plays more than one role in capitalism. The working class is also variable capital, the source of capitalists' wealth. The working class makes and reproduces capitalism. Under compulsion for sure but different kinds of compulsion and sometimes people experience it as something they chose (buying a gift at a shop is returning your wages into circulation, for instance).
http://libcom.org/library/its-racism-stupid-lorenzo-ervin
article by lorenzo komboa ervin
& x 2 quotes from it
but what does it mean to engage with the fact that whatever the origins of the word it is now being used by people both in the UK and the US who arn't in any of the life situations you describe. language has its own life that can start in one place and become popular and widely used and change its meaning and associations in its course.
the uk obviously has a predominantly white ruling class and white power hierarchy and white people as a social grouping predominantly experience manifold material advantages in comparision to the majority of people of colour resident in the UK - what succinct way/s can this be referred to or described in?