Essay For Kim Woods

Book: From Inquiry to Academic Writing

Peggy McIntosh

White privilege: The Invisible Knapsack

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and has written many well-known articles on mul-ticultural and gender-equitable curricula and is a sought-after lecturer on these topics. The ideas in this very influential essay are drawn from conference presentations in 1986 and 1987 and were published as a work-ing paper in 1988 and reprinted in the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School . When McIntosh first spoke out about white privilege, she was among the first scholars developing an analysis of “whiteness” as a racial cate-gory, which involves in part examining the ways European-Americans have become an “invisible norm” against which other racial categories are often measured. In this article, McIntosh traces her own shift from simply seeing nonwhites as “disadvantaged” to seeing her own whiteness as an unearned “privilege.” As she explains early in her essay, 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, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks. (para. 3) Perhaps the most striking feature of this essay, rare in scholarly writ-ing, is the long personal list in the middle of the piece in which she details the unearned advantages she experiences in her daily life. This strategy of connecting concrete, daily experiences to larger systems of power enables readers to freshly “see” advantages that might come from social class, nationality, educational status, gender, sexuality, nationality, or able- bodied status. In other words, McIntosh’s approach is one we might all use to analyze many different aspects of our daily lives.In her final paragraph, she leaves readers with the provocative ques-tion, “What will we do with such knowledge?” In this piece, McIntosh takes risks and reveals her previous ignorance and her slow learning pro-cess; in so doing, she invites readers to take similar risks and to begin this important work, as well.

T hrough 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 overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are dis-advantaged. They may say they will work to raise women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s status. 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, less-ened, or ended.Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white 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 recognize 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 spe-cial 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 un- acknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressive-ness 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 col-league 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 line of work cannot count on most of these conditions. 1. I can, if I 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 purchas-ing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors 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. 6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. 7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color 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.10. 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 some-one who can cut my hair.13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color 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 tol-erate 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 secondhand 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 poli-cies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.24. I can be pretty sure that if I 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, postcards, 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 feel-ing 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 I 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 conse-quences 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 profes-sional, 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 feel-ings of rejection owing to my race.43. If I 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 atten-tion 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 embarrass-ment 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 domes-tic partnership.50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

Elusive and Fugitive

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations 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 variet-ies 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 pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, 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, comfort-able, 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 con-ferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over-empower certain groups. Such privilege sim-ply 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 enti-tlement. 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 saw 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 are 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 simi-larly 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 dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the ad- vantages 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 than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the mem-bers 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 rac-ism 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 systems 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 con-ferred 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 tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects 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 oblivi-ousness 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 free-dom 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.