Privilege (n.): a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

Now, before you read this article, please understand that this isn't a condemnation rant against my race; I don't mean to stand on a soapbox and beat down those who don't agree with me; this is me, a writer -- who has no idea what it feels like to face real discrimination in my country -- addressing a serious, nation-splitting problem.

When I was a young boy, I was playing with a fake gun in a field behind my house. Though a neighbor called the police, when the officer arrived, she didn't call for back up, she didn't pull her weapon, she didn't slam me to the ground or throw me in cuffs, she only forcefully told me to put down the gun and go back into my house. On Nov. 22, 2014, in Cleveland, a police officer pulled beside Tamir Rice, a 12 year-old black boy playing with a toy gun, and shot him dead -- no warning, no backup, just bullets.

I've always thought, since I saw Tamir Rice on the news, if I wasn't white, would I still be here? A toy gun was a death warrant for Tamir why wasn't it for me? The answer can be found in the number of deaths at the hands of the police in the U.S. in this year, alone.

So far in 2015, 172 black men and women have been killed by police this year. The statistic seems to pale in comparison to the number of white people killed by police -- 315 total. However, after looking past the simple numbers, the facts become far more disturbing. Per capita, 4.12 black people were killed by police, as compared to only 1.59 white citizens. Even more concerning, out of the 172 black Americans killed by police, 53 were completely unarmed whatsoever, despite the fact that the number of white Americans killed by police is nearly double the black amount, only 55 total white victims were unarmed.

So, what is white privilege? White privilege is that it's three times less likely for me to be killed by police than my black friends, and that if we're both unarmed, that statistic jumps to six times less likely. I know that if I get killed by police, there won't be a crowd of angry spectators on Facebook looking for a reason to justify my death, and if I was to be killed unjustly by police, it's more than likely that the officer would be sentenced, rather than acquitted.

White privilege is that my black friends are three and half times more likely to get arrested than I am if we were both pulled over for marijuana possession.

My privilege as a white man is that, despite the stigma that only minorities receive scholarships, white students like myself receive "more than three-quarters (76%) of all...scholarship and grant funding, even though [we] represent less than two-thirds (62%) of the student population."

My privilege as a white man is that a black woman will only make 64 cents for every dollar that I do. But most of all, I'm privileged in the way that after I write this, I'll still see most of my Facebook friends denying that privilege exists, and instead finding more ways to blame communities of color for their disadvantaged state.

Look, I'm not saying that I know a quick fix solution to fix the racial divide in our society. What I am saying is that I don't know how many more black men and women have to be turned into hashtags before our nation will admit there's a problem.

I don't know what it's like to be discriminated against. Hell, I can't even understand that concept. But what I do know is that I was born into this world lucky enough to have a voice that people will listen to, and it's time for me, and people like me, to stop using that privilege to beat others down, and instead to speak a little louder for those who have had their voices smothered for so long.