Return to JT's homepage
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
By: 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 overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve 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. 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 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 on 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 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 justly 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 which will allow "them" to be more like "us".
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 which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin color
privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical
location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can see, 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.
I 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 to systematically overempower certain groups. Such
privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.
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 renting or
purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and 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 widely represented.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about
"civilization," I am shown that people of my color made 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 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.
10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my
skin color not to work against the appearance of financial
reliability.
11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people
who might not like them.
12. 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.
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's majority 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 being seen as a cultural outsider.
18. 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.
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 out because of my race.
20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting
cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of
my race.
21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to
feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, out
numbered, 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 I got it because of race.
23. 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.
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 it has racial overtones.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have
them more or less match my skin.
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 which I once took for granted. Nor did
I think of any of these prequisites 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.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a
pattern of assumptions which 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,
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 want, then, to
distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred
systematically. Power from unearned 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 advantages 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 which I originally
saw as attendant on being a human being in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are
many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the
advantaging associated with them should not be seen as the same. In
addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage
which 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 Combahee River Collective
State-ment of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently. 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 group 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 systems won't be enough to change them. I was
taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed
their attitudes. 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 tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or
equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred
dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about
equal opportunity seems to be 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.
Though 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 to
weaken hidden systems of 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 Collage Center
for Research on Women. 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.
Return to JT's homepage
Page maintained by: Jim Thomas - jthomas@sun.soci.niu.edu