The term is definitely offensive and intentionally so. It is intended to offend, in the sense that it is intended to disturb folks romantic vision of themselves... specifically that their accomplishments are solely the fruits of their own virtue, thrift, cleverness, worthiness, etc., rather than propped up by external inherent advantages. This is the point I keep making about the NFL kneeling protest, vis-a-vis the larger, Black Lives Matter protests by the public and all the fallout and related protests... the underlying thing about all of these protests is that they are raising awareness and making public complaint about, among other things...racism. And complaints about racism make people uncomfortable, so they don't want to hear it.
That is the conscious and subconscious factor underlying the vast majority of complaints about the various protests, and the reason the same people who condemned the peaceful NFL protests for "disrespecting the flag, troops, country" and similar nonsense, are now condemning the current protests for being "violent" and proclaiming that they would support the protests if only they were peaceful... conveniently forgetting that they were offended by the peaceful NFL protests of the very same thing... the complaints about the protests being "violent" are hogwash. People who are uncomfortable hearing about racism will always find an excuse to be offended, outraged, dissatisfied, troubled by etc., any protest that invokes complaints about racism, no matter what form the protest takes, because being reminded about racism interferes with their internal romantic narrative about themselves.
Which brings me back to the sentiments you express so clearly in your post. What makes people uncomfortable with complaints about racism, is that it disturbs their romantic underdog vision of themselves. All of us are seduced into the romantic underdog vision of ourselves, whereby we are against the odds and obstacles, in a heroic life struggle to make our way in this world. If we can imagine ourselves as an underdog, then our successes become heroic, having been achieved against all odds... while our failures can be excused, dismissed, as being inevitable, given how the deck was stacked against us.
Being reminded of racism disturbs that... because it undermines people's internal narrative that they are disadvantaged, and instead suggests that they were in-fact advantaged. So then their successes are not heroic, but simply the expected result of their advantages... while their failures are magnified and inexcusable... because they were coming from a position of advantage, and still somehow managed to fail. Its a very uncomfortable position to be in and so it makes sense that people would be irritated with their romantic self-image undermined.
So what I want to suggest to you here is that if the term "white privilege" were replaced with the term "black disadvantage", people would not be any more comfortable with it, because it would still undermine their internal romantic-underdog narrative and thus make them uncomfortable. "Black Lives Matter" essentially invokes "black disadvantage" as does "affirmative action"... and yet, people are still offended by them and oppose them. "Affirmative action" and "white privilege" essentially invoke/mean the same thing... but the different terms don't necessarily make people any less hostile to either... because it is the underlying issue that irritates/discomforts... rather than the term itself.
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