that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the recent opposition from right-wing critics since approximately 2014. Definition White privilege is a social phenomenon intertwined with race and racism. The American Anthropological Association states that, "The 'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth." Although the definition of "white privilege" has been somewhat fluid, it is generally agreed to refer to the implicit or systemic advantages that people who are deemed white have relative to people who are not deemed white. Not having to experience suspicion and other adverse reactions to one's race is also often termed a type of white privilege. The term is used in discussions focused on the mostly hidden benefits that white people possess in a society where racism is prevalent and whiteness is considered normal, rather than on the detriments to people who are the objects of racism. As such, most definitions and discussions of the concept use as a starting point McIntosh's metaphor of the "invisible backpack" that white people unconsciously "wear" in a society where racism is prevalent. History European colonialism European colonialism, involving some of the earliest significant contacts of Europeans with indigenous peoples, was crucial in the foundation and development of white privilege. Academics, such as Charles V. Hamilton, have explored how European colonialism and slavery in the early modern period, including the transatlantic slave trade and Europe's colonization of the Americas, began a centuries-long progression of white privilege and non-white subjugation. Sociologist Bob Blauner has proposed that this era of European colonialism and slavery was the height, or most extreme version, of white privilege in recorded history. In British abolitionist and MP James Stephen's 1824 The Slavery of the British West Indies, while examining the racist colonial laws denying African slaves the ability to give evidence in West Indian jury trials; Stephen makes a clarifying distinction between masters, slaves, and "free persons not possessing the privilege of a white skin". In historian William Miller Macmillan's 1929 The Frontier and the Kaffir Wars, 1792–1836, he describes the motivations of Afrikaner settlers to embark upon the Great Trek as an attempt to preserve their racial privilege over indigenous Khoisan people; "It was primarily land hunger