Unbroken Brain's Interesting Take on Privilege

I'm listening to Unbroken Brain on audiobook. I've read it twice before on my Kindle, an I wrote a review of it here. There was one sticking point that I was reminded of on this third time around.

Maia Szalavizt recounts here interaction with the criminal justice system. She had been a cocaine and heroin addict and she sold drugs to support her habit. Somehow she got on the cops' radar and was arrested for dealing. She never did any actual prison time, though she was forced into various treatment programs. She describes her white-ness as helping her get privileges that a black defendant couldn't necessarily count on, which ultimately kept her out of prison. "It's impossible to know how much the privileges of race and class were what enabled me to get decent addiction treatment, return to college, and help my lawyer demonstrate to the court that I could soon be a respectable tax-payer. They certainly mattered, however."

Fair enough. But then, she also mentions that her father was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. He was a successful chemist when he came to the states. (This particular demographic was, famously, incredibly successful. Interesting post about that at Slate Star Codex.) I don't know exactly what "privilege" means, but I think if the official government policy is that you should be exterminated, you don't have it. There isn't necessarily a contradiction here. Maybe a Hungarian Jew is maximally "un-privileged" in Nazi-occupied Hungary, but suddenly privileged when s/he moves to the United States? I believe there are versions of the "white privilege" story whereby discrimination leaves deep and lasting scars on the psyches of the discriminated-against races, even getting passed on to the next generation. The success of Jews who fled the Holocaust would seem to discredit this particular story, at the very least implying that "deep psychic scars" aren't inevitable or don't inevitably lead to higher rates of social problems.

Szalavitz describes her father as suffering from a deep depression. She points out that this is a pattern among Holocaust survivors. She even has a long exposition about epigenetics in Unbroken Brain, about how stress in a parent's or grand-parent's environment can have an impact on the child/grandchild's gene expression. There's a "deep scars" story to be told here, for sure. But to weave it into a "privilege" narrative, someone has to square it with the economic and social success of these deeply scarred peoples.

None of this is to deny that privilege exists. Rather, I'd like to see more rigor and discipline in nailing down the phenomenon, explaining the causal mechanisms involved, addressing counterexamples seriously, etc. It's hard work, but it wins you more converts when you do it right.