In regards to white privilege, I don’t think some people like to be told they are privileged, especially if they feel as though they’ve come from a deprived area or struggled through childhood poverty etc. They don’t have the capacity to understand different types of privilege. E.g I am white and I came from a middle class family, however I have experienced major sexism and harassment in my daily life. I’d be annoyed if someone told me to check my privilege because I’ve never been raped, only been groped (extreme example I know but it’s the only thing I can think of that applies to myself as I know I am very privileged). I can understand this to an extent and I used to think like this too at one point. It’s about educating people to understand how the system benefits white people, males and the upper/middle classes and how we can make the system fairer.
Then there’s the fact that some people feel that if things get better for minorities, it means that things will get worse for them. They believe that tokenism is denying them jobs and opportunities that could be there’s, where in reality its trying to recruit more BAME into certain positions and giving them opportunities they might never get by using quotas. These are the people who think minorities are stealing their jobs and immigrants are getting unfair advantages in benefits, housing etc.
Some people don’t want to be tainted by the sins of their fathers, so to speak. So rather than acknowledging we have done bad things in the past and opening up the discussion on how to overcome past mistakes and make a better society, they dismiss the past and deny that society is fundamentally racist today. It’s probably embarrassing to be confronted with how racist society is (I was shocked when I started reading about it) and that we as a society are partly to blame for it. It also means that we, as citizens,have to do something to make it better, which requires effort and thought (we’ve become comfortable in our ignorance).
And last of all, a small minority of people are just pure racist. They don’t care about black or other minority’s rights and lives because they see them as inferior and as bad people. They rely on the general population’s ignorance of institutional and systematic racism to keep them subdued. They provoke and stoke tensions and then try to brush off any attempt at progress as ‘PC gone mad’ which will provoke certain types of people.