White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack - Part II  Peggy McIntosh

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"

Continued from the September, 2007 Heartbeat

If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own. In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be gnorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms.
Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups
were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many
kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people
of color.

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred privilege can look
like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my
list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your
race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to
ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and
negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For
example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be
seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is
an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the
power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in
unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred
dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether
we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance,
and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they
actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that
racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial
identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly
to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or
advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and
heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In
addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic
class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are
interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their "Black Feminist
Statement" of 1977.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we
can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my
class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in
individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought
racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end
if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for
whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can
palliate but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences
and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and
conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems
to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that
systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is
kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that
democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident
action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for
some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What
will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we
will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to
try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181. The working paper contains a longer list of privileges. This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School. Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, is also the founder, and co-director with Emily Style and Brenda Flyswithhawks. The SEED Project helps teachers create their own year-long, school-based seminars on making school climates, K-12 curricula, and teaching methods more gender fair and multi-culturally equitable. Dr. McIntosh directs the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project, which provides workshops on privilege systems, feelings of fraudulence, and diversifying workplaces, curricula, and teaching methods. Dr. McIntosh has taught English, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the Brearley School, Harvard University, Trinity College (Washington, D.C.), Durham University (England), and Wellesley College. She is co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute, and has been consulting editor to Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. In 1993-1994, she consulted with women on 22 Asian campuses on the development of Women's Studies and programs to bring materials from Women's Studies into the main curriculum. In addition to having two honorary degrees, she is a recipient of the Klingenstein Award for Distinguished Educational Leadership from Columbia Teachers College.