Many people see the idea of 'white privilege' as a personal attack or as a dismissal of the hardships experienced by white people who may be experiencing some of the same difficulties as are disproportionately experienced by people of colour.
In their defensive reactions, they lose the mental space to understand that 'white privilege' explains the objective knowledge our institutions and culture disproportionately disadvantage the ethnic minorities who often had no voice in their design. The privilege of white people is that some of these disadvantages are so unlikely to affect us that we had not even considered them as possibilities. White privilege is not an attack on white people, but a call to shut up and listen for once.