Radiolab covered this recently:
Post No Evil | Radiolab | Duration: 1:11:45 | Published: Fri, 17 Aug 2018 07:20:00 -0400 | Episode: http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil/
Media: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/152249110
Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and...
Let's talk about the word "cracker". In the US, it's a derogatory term for white people that was coined by black people. The etymology is that a "cracker" was a white man who was hired by the plantation owner to crack the whip at the black slaves. Even in white society, these "crackers" were pretty much what we'd call "white trash"--they had effectively zero social status, received no largesse, and lived in poverty themselves. Literally the only thing they had going for them was that they were white, which meant they were the ones cracking the whips and not having the whips cracked at them. Which only made them all the more eager to crack the whips and do the dirty work of oppressing black people. Being white was literally the only thing these people had to be "proud" of. And so, the most evil people weren't necessarily the plantation owners (who were evil in a detached, hypocritical way), but rather the crackers (who were evil in a directly hateful, sadistic sense). A plantation owner could come around to the idea that slavery was wrong, as Washington and Jefferson did, and merely live in a state of complicated hypocrisy. A cracker is a pure mass of utter racial animus.
The same dynamic remained after the abolition of slavery, and it's the same dynamic that you describe.
Privilege is basically the logical inverse of discrimination. If driving while black means getting pulled over more (discrimination), then driving while white means not getting pulled over more (privilege).
Hope this clarifies how even poor whites are "privileged".
One could equally well point the the anti-colonial resistance in the Balkans and the Caucuses against Ottoman imperialism. The result of which were massacres and genocides up until 1925. You could still buy white sex slaves in Istanbul in 1915: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#...
There's a "punching up" vs. "punching down" model that pretty much explains most "hypocrisy" on this issue. For instance, even subtle hints of anti-Semitism expressed by white Westerners (e.g. being anti-George Soros in particular) are condemned far more vehemently than anti-Semitism expressed by black people or Muslims, because of the perception that Jews, being perceived as predominantly white and Westernized themselves, are more privileged than blacks and Muslims but less privileged than white Gentiles.
I don't agree with this mentality myself because the tides can turn a lot faster than your ideological model of privilege and oppression can change to reflect it, but it's similar to the ideas that are commonly expressed on the left and serves as a decent predictive model of their attitudes.