Quintonio LeGrier was shot dead by a policeman who's now suing his family. Do you believe in white privilege yet?

White privilege is a casual roll of the eyes. It’s being offered a better mortgage rate without having to ask. It’s about not being followed around a department store. Yet above all else, it’s shooting a black teenager dead and then feeling entitled to $10m in compensation

Quintonio LeGrier was studying electrical engineering (Family photo)

We like to pretend white privilege doesn’t exist in America. After all, segregation is a thing of the past, right? There are laws in place that protect minorities from persecution, affirmative action pulls kids out of bad neighbourhoods and everybody has an equal claim to that seat on the bus. In the eyes of the law, all Americans are equal.

If only we were equal in the eyes of one another.

Last year, young black men were nine times more likely than anyone else to be shot and killed by the police – and we’re not just talking about so-called hoodlums. We’re talking about young kids minding their own business. We’re talking about racial prejudice that leads to snap judgements. More important still, we’re talking about the institutions in place that subsequently attempt to rationalise and defend those snap judgements.

Cue the most American story ever told.

On Friday, a white police officer named Robert Rialmo filed a lawsuit against a black family in Chicago. Why? Rialmo shot and killed their teenage boy on Boxing Day last year.

Rialmo claims that 19-year-old student Quintonio LeGrier swung a baseball bat dangerously close to the officer’s head after being called out to attend a disturbance. Plenty of people have said otherwise, but their testimony won’t do a damn thing to bring Quintonio back. Rialmo shot the teenager six times, killing both him and an innocent bystander – his neighbour Bettie Jones, a 55-year-old mother of five - in the process.

Snap poll: who’s the real victim here? Rialmo claims he’s been so ‘traumatised’ by the shooting that he’s now demanding LeGrier’s grieving family fork over a nonsensically large sum of $10m in compensation. Could there be any more glaring instance of adding insult to injury?

Nowhere else on Planet Earth could a white man shoot an unarmed black kid and then demand millions of dollars for his trouble. This is an outrageously American response to an outrageously American problem – and it’s depressingly symptomatic of the deep-seeded notions of white privilege that continue to dominate almost every aspect of American culture.

As a middle-class white man, the world has always been my oyster. I was taught to believe I had nothing to fear from gun-wielding police officers (and I don’t). I know white kids who have pointed loaded weapons at officers of the law in the US and lived to laugh about it. Trayvon Martin, on the other hand, was shot dead for holding a bag of Skittles.

But white privilege isn’t just a matter of police brutality – it’s about so much more.

White privilege is the sum of a million and one seemingly minuscule daily interactions that some of us are lucky enough to take for granted. It’s a casual roll of the eyes. It’s being offered a better mortgage rate without having to ask. It’s about not being followed around a department store. It’s the deciding factor after a job interview, and it’s a sincere greeting at the start of each day.

Yet above all else, it’s shooting a black teenager dead and then feeling entitled to $10m in compensation.

Everyday white Americans might not see white privilege at every turn, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Ask anybody. Countless individuals are being let down by our society each and every day – and until we’re ready to stand up and admit these miscarriages of justice are the by-product of institutional racism, there’s little hope for creating a better society in America.

Then again, and perhaps most depressingly, there are probably a whole lot of middle class white people who think America is completely perfect just the way it is.