The term "privilege" is being used here in the social sense of the word, not the generic sense of the word. Which, to me as somebody who's spent a decent bit of time wrestling with the fact that, yes, I am incredibly privileged, is actually a little irritating--it's jargon but many people try to wedge it in as a normal word, much like (but less egregiously than) how Stallmanites try to co-opt "free".
> If a person wants to claim my background is privileged and that's what enabled it all and stake claim to what I have as a result
Which literally nobody does. That's the price of using jargon and expecting everybody to already understand you, and it's what drives me batshit. Privilege is not referring to the genesis of your accomplishments. Privilege is referring to the difficulty slider. And very, very few people in tech are at 'normal', to say nothing of 'easy' or 'very easy'. And it is generally considered gauche to roll one's eyes (and while I don't think you necessarily mean to, I kind of get that vibe a little? not maliciously) at somebody who's cranked up to 'holy shit impossible'.
I am at 'very easy' on that slider, even though I've had things that (to me) feel really shitty: my mom left town when I was ten, my brain doesn't quite work right all the time, and I am punishingly introverted. But the sum of the things working for me that were an accident of birth--I'm white, I'm male, I was born in America--is so huge by comparison that I have it on easy street. And it doesn't diminish me to acknowledge that. It does behoove me to recognize it and to help people who aren't so very fortunate, though, which is why I get real salty around here when the cryptoracist and outright racist contingents start pontificating at length about "the black mentality" or other garbage thoughts. (Which I am emphatically not saying you are doing, but happens all-too-often around here.)
Chew on this: http://danilocampos.com/2013/02/unpacking-my-knapsack-the-pr... - Danilo is an HN poster (one of my favorites) and this is a tremendous thing that's worth reading. Because he hits on something that's important, and I wish was more the focus of these discussions than "pfft, you have privilege," when he says: "Any pride I take in that hard work is dwarfed by the anxiety that I don’t yet know how to help others get to the point where they can work as hard as I have." (A lot of what defensive people see as "shut up" when the concept of privilege is invoked is really "think about what you should be grateful for, and extend graciousness to others." But that requires an understanding of the concepts involved, and...argh.)