I have a roommate who I get into a lot of political debates with. He's pretty moderate and usually reasonable, but sometimes he has conservative views on social issues, and we recently got into a debate about race.

I was trying to explain to him how white privilege and subconscious racism is harmful to the black community and how it permeates American society and results in inequalities with respect to healthcare, law enforcement, education, income, etc. I told him about how white identity and white culture is based on colonialism and oppression and that as a white person we all have innate biases and racist tendencies. It's not that we're full-blown hateful, racist, bigots but we all have an inherent tendency to take a white perspective on political issues, we often overlook or ignore the problems faced by the BIPOC community, and we're prone to outbursts of racial violence and discrimination (e.g. the recent incidents of police brutality in the media).

My roommate keeps saying that white privilege and subconscious bias don't exist because biologically speaking races don't actually exist. I know that biologically speaking race doesn't exist, but my friends argument is that therefore you can't say that white people have innate biases and dispositions towards oppression and racism. I know this is incorrect, but I don't know the proper terminology from a biological/psychological perspective for explaining innate racism in white people.

I tried to explain to him that it's not because you belong to the white race or white culture that you have these biases, but rather because you are a white person. It's not because of racial groups or racial identities, but because of your race as an individual. In other words, it's not because you belong to the white "race" that your have these dispositions towards racism and violence but rather because you are a white individual. How else can I explain this to him? And what is the proper psychological/biological terminology?