White Privilege:
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Peggy McIntosh
"I was taught to see racism only in individual
acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my
group"
Through work to bring materials from women's studies
into the rest of the curriculum, I have often
noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged, even
though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say they will
work to women's statutes, in the society, the
university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea
of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of
advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male
privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege
as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are
most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are
interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was
similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been
taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary
aspects, white privilege,
which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to
recognise white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.
So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege.
I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets
that I can count on cashing in each
day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like
an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks,
visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies
work to reveal male
privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having
white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After I realized the ·extent to which men work from a base of
unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their
oppressiveness was unconscious . Then I remembered the frequent charges from
women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to
understand why we are just
seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count
the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion
about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training
in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was
taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her
individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague
Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative,
and average, and also ideal, so that
when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will
allow "them" to be more like "us"
Daily effects of white privilege
I decided to try to work
on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege
in my life. I have chosen those
conditions that I think in my case attach
somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status,
or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are
intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent
contact in this particular time,
place and time of work
cannot count on most of these conditions.
1.
I can if l wish arrange to be in the
company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom
I was trained to
mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting
or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4.
I can be pretty sure that my neighbours in such a location will be neutral
or pleasant to me.
5.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I know what many of our immigrant families experience because they have told me ....
6. I can tum on the television or open to the
front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. Positively....
7.
When I am told about
our national heritage or about "civilisation," I am shown that people
of my colour made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular
materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9.
If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
I 0. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which
I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another
person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my
race represented, into a supermarket and find
the staple foods which fit with my
cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find
someone who can cut my
hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my
skin colour not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15.
I do not have to educate my children
to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers
will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries
about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their race.
17.
I can talk with my mouth full and not
have people put this down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer
letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty
or the illiteracy of my race.
19.
I can speak in public to a powerful
male group without putting my race on trial.
20.
I can do well in a challenging
situation without being called a credit to my race.
21.
I am never asked to speak for all the
people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of
color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any
penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear
its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24.
I can be pretty sure that if l ask to
talk to the "person in charge", I will be
facing a person of my race.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return,
I can be sure I haven't been singled
out because of my race.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting
cards, dolls, toys and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to
feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard,
held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of
another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than
to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the
promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within
my present setting,
even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If l declare there is a racial
issue at hand, or there isn't a racial
issue at hand, my race will lend me
more credibility for either position than a person
of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and
minority activist programs, or disparage them,
or learn from them, but
in any case, I can find ways to be
more or
less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32.
My culture gives me little fear about
ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor
will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being
seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without
having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly,
I need not ask of each negative
episode or situation
whether it had racial
overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to
talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or
professional, without asking whether a person of my race would
be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39.
I can be late to a meeting without
having the lateness reflect on my race.
40.
I can choose public
accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in
the places I have chosen. ·
41.
I can
be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to
experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If l have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44.
I can easily find academic
courses and institutions which give attention
only to people of my race.
45.
I can expect figurative language and
imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46.
I can
choose blemish cover or bandages
in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting
embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48.
I have no difficulty finding
neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support
our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50.
I will feel welcomed and
"normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and ocial.
Elusive and fugitive
I repeatedly
forgot each of the realisations on this list until I wrote it down. For me
white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The
pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of
meritocracy. 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 ignorant,
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 tum, 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.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the
Wellesley College Center for Research
on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper
189. "White Privil
ege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences
through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00from the Wellesley College Centerfor 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
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