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White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

McIntosh, Peggy

Independent School. Winter90, Vol. 49 Issue 2, p31. 5p.

Article

WHITE people DISCRIMINATION in education RACISMUNIVERSITIES & colleges

Provides insights on the existence of privileges for the white populationin academes. Daily effects of white privilege; Factors that shape whiteprivilege; Types of privileges; Association of strength and power withprivilege.

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WHITE PRIVILEGE: UNPACKING THE INVISIBLE KNAPSACK

I was taught to see racism only in individualacts of meanness, not in invisible systemsconferring dominance on my group.Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticedmen's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women aredisadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or thecurriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surroundthe subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilegefrom being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in oursociety are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied andprotected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at adisadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at anadvantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize maleprivilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to seewhite privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but aboutwhich I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of specialprovisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

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Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal maleprivilege 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 muchof their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color thatwhite women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen asoppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearnedskin 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 aparticipant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended onher 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 whenwe work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."

Daily effects of white privilegeI decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. Ihave chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than toclass, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricatelyintertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I comeinto daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of theseconditions.

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can affordand in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widelyrepresented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my colormade it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarketand find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone whocan deal with my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against theappearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

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12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters without having people attribute thesechoices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the world'smajority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without beingseen as a cultural outsider. 18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will befacing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled outbecause of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazinesfeaturing people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather thanisolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that Igot it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will bemistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether ithas racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color that more or less match my skin.

Elusive and fugitiveI repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turnedout to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up themyth 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 oncetook for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need amore finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want foreveryone 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 pattern of assumptions that were passed on tome as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among thosewho could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any more I was educated to want to make. I couldthink of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage,

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fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, Icould also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups werelikely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds ofhostility, 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 afavored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described herework systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because ofone's race or sex.

Earned strength, unearned powerI want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power fromunearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all ofthe privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent toyou, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. others, like theprivilege 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, andnegative 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 privilegefor a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantagefor them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw asattendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferreddominance.

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

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, andheterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. Inaddition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economicclass, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than 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 cansee, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class andplace, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of

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meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on mygroup from birth.

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

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

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

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

Permission to reprint this excerpt must be obtained from Peggy McIntosh at the address above or by callingher at 617-431-1453.

This excerpted essay is reprinted here from the July/August 1989 issue of Peace and Freedom, the bimonthlyjournal of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, based at 1213 Race St., Philadelphia PA19107.

~~~~~~~~By Peggy McIntosh

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. This essay isexerpted from Working Paper 189, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To SeeCorrespondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from theWellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181. The working paper contains a longerlist of privileges.

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