White Privilege Redux

Here's an interesting rejoinder to use when someone tries to lecture you about white privilege:

According to the CDC, whites are 20 times more likely than African-Americans to get skin cancer, the most common form of cancer in the world.

They might claim that you're missing the point, but so are they.

Any physical attribute that one receives at birth can be both a blessing and a curse.  No one attribute gives someone an absolute advantage over others who lack that attribute.  

Most critical race theorists claim that they're talking about a net advantage in society that the group in power enjoys.  In the United States at least, you are usually exempt from many types of discrimination if you are white.  However, other minority groups such as Chinese-Americans share many of these same privileges.  For example, most Chinese-Americans need not worry about being surveilled in convenience stores, brutalized by police, or suspected of having benefited from affirmative action.

Critical race theorists often claim that whites have "adopted" Asians as a model minority and somehow given them the same privileges that they enjoy.  Does this claim stand up to logic though?  As some researchers point out, different Asian groups have different levels of status in American society.  Chinese-Americans tend to be more successful in the U.S. than many groups of Southeast Asians, for example.     Why would whites arbitrarily  only "adopt" some Asian groups and not others?   Is there a good reason to adopt the Chinese but not Thais and Vietnamese? If this is a systematic effort by the white majority to somehow pit groups against each other, then why wouldn't they allow Chinese-Americans to become one of them, just as they "allowed" the Irish, Italians, and Jews?

If critical race theorists believe that "Asian" is an unfair descriptor of ethnicity, then they ought to be consistent and say that so is "white."  Do the Uighur minority of Western China, who are literally Caucasian, benefit from white privilege?