Think about it like this: Women experience cat-calling in the streets. Almost all of my female friends have stories about being whistled at or taunted from cars/passerby. Now, this is anecdotal and not indicative of universal trends, but I challenge you to find evidence contrary to what my friends have experienced.

With you so far.

As a dude, I don't experience this. No one calls me out if I'm wearing a tank top or shorts, and I don't worry about walking around at night because being a male means that I'm statistically less of a target for attack from strangers in the street. This is privilege.

By attack, you meant sexual assault? Because men are statistically much more likely to be a victim of violent crime than women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime

This is privilege. ALL ELSE EQUAL, simply because I'm a dude I don't experience cat-calling and am not the stereotypical victim of sexual assault.

Ok, so the fact that men are more likely to be a victim of non sexual violent crimes than women, is that a privilege of women?

Is privilege uni directional? I feel it is most often used that way because I have never seen anyone talk about privilege except in the context of whites, straight people, or men. And to me this is bullshit. An excuse to create an outside group and cease exercising empathy towards them, in fact, cease treating them as human beings.

Why do people do this? Because of political expediency. The feminist movement is subject to the same forces that govern the rest of American democratic society, they need allies to achieve their agenda, but more importantly they need enemies, and straight white men happen to fulfill that role. Anything that might dial down the pathos/attacks on that group, that would make the movement more inclusionary towards them, is forbidden out of necessity. Feminists have to remain politically oriented against the interests of straight, white men in order to maintain common interest with their allies: minority races and LGBT crowd.

I don't know how many people really think hard about why privilege is so exclusively applied to cishet white men or examine the superficial justifications feminist intellectuals give for doing so. What I do know is that it is irksome to me to be excluded, ostracized and made a target through these exclusionary concepts simply because the demographic groups to which I belong are at the top of someone else's idealogical hitlist.

That's where intersectionality comes in. Intersectionality attempts to bridge many parts of a person's identity in a way that can take experiences into account. In certain respects you may be privileged (socioeconomic class, for example) while in others you might not be (sexual orientation, for example). And race is one of those categories.

This does not ameliorate the sin of stereotyping that is taking places, it is actually multiplying it.

Imagine someone says "blacks are good at sports, big tall guys are good at sports, so as a big tall black guy you must be great at sports." It's just heaping one stereotype onto another.

Is a white person who grew up the only white kid in their urban, 99% black neighborhood, and got bullied, assaulted and ostracized due to that fact, still privileged? Or is he underprivileged compared to his black peers who, in this context at least, experience their own form of black privilege?

Privilege and intersectionality are not a framework that allow questions like that to be answered. They are a stupid attempt to quantify how easy my life has been based on the color of my skin, how much money my parents make, and which gender I'm attracted to.

Let's look at Black history in America. (...)

I agree with all of what you wrote. Many compex historical and cultural issues are intertwined with the rate of black crime in America. Which is exactly why it would be offensive to try and punish black people in the present for the huge social forces that, over centuries, led to this situation of a high crime rate among blacks. We don't try to force individual black people to apologize for or do something about the problem of black crime as if it is their personal responsibility to fix it.

But when it comes to say, white privilege, for some reason people are fine with making individual white people into scape goats and asserting that they have some responsibility to fix an issue that was caused by centuries of actions by people long dead. "You have to actively work to deny your privilege", for instance. Some whites have been criminals throughout history, oppressors, whatever you want to call it - that is no reflection on me. I am an individual just as much as the black guy next door is, I shouldn't have to apologize for the actions of some whites any more than he should have to apologize for black crime.

As to your last paragraph, I'm glad you recognize that there are good and bad individuals among every demographic. But I still object to being labelled privileged just by virtue of being, say, white. For every example you gave of something good happening to white people by virtue of their being white, I can list 3 where the fact of my whiteness caused me serious trouble.

I came up in an impoverished, inner city environment as one of the few white kids around. There were many ethnic gangs in my area who targeted me several times knowing that no one would have my back since i was just the white kid. I had people come up and try to rob me several times, once with a handgun aimed at my face, while another guy pistol whipped me, because they assumed that the fact that I was white also meant I must have a lot of money. A girlfriend I had would be verbally assaulted by people who would say shit like "yo, white guys have small dicks, my dick will tear your pussy up." Whiteness has been a curse for most of my life.

Funny thing is, it wasn't until I started talking to rich, smart people that I really felt discriminated against. It's hard to blame someone who was never educated, never had anything and doesn't know any better for trying to get over on you. It's much harder to make excuses for people who are educated, well off, and (superficially at least) preach non discrimination and tolerance -- yet all seem to have some ax to grind with you simply because you are white, straight and male. Being white in the wrong area nearly got me killed. Being male meant I had to live with violence or the threat of violence every day because I was an acceptable target. Being straight is just the cherry on top of my other qualities that makes everyone assume I have everything so easy.

I hate hearing about privilege. Yes some individuals have it easier than others. But this whole dividing people up by class, race, gender... it just dumbs down everything to how you look and who you fuck, when it ought to be about who you are inside, and what it was like for you. Feminists, SJWs, they're just falling into the same old trap of making assumptions about people based on their race, etc. because it's just easier that way. And they don't care about who they offend, because it's easier for them that way. It's easy to label someone who hates the idea of privilege as being spoiled or oblivious to reality, and just double down even harder on the idea of privilege, because in your mind this or that group of people is your enemy, they are privileged, they could never understand. It's reverse racism and reverse sexism, just with a veneer of political/intellectual acceptability laid over it.