Instructions

1. Read the article you will find below, after # 5 in the directions, entitled "Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" by Peggy McIntosh. When she wrote this article, she was working in women's issues. She wondered why the men around her couldn't understand their advantages as white men over white women. She began thinking of populations that are seen differently than the 'white men' and realized that she,too, had some advantages over others. 
2. Consider who in our American society has privilege. 
3. List at least ten ways that you are privilege they have that give them an advantage over others. Identify one and write about what leads you to have tha privilege. 
4. Think about others who don’t have the same level of privilege as you. Reread the last part of the article in which McIntosh puzzles about the assumptions men held regarding women’s studies and compare that to how ordinary people of privilege might hold the assumptions they do regarding people who don’t have the same privilege.  Include your thinking about these items.
5. Bring this written assignment.

Article: “Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” by Peggy McIntosh.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack 

From : McIntosh, P. (2007). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Race, class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study, 177-82.

Through the 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 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. Denial s which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which 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 was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realizes  I had been taught about racism as some­ thing which 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 un­ tutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an in-visible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, 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 us some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, " Havin g 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 don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been condition ed 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, 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 attack 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 co-worker, friends and acquaintance  with whom I come in to daily and 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. 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 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 TV 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 food which fits 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 with­ out 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, unheard , held at a distance, or feared. 
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co­ workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race. 
23. I can choose public accommodations 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 or 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 backpack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience which 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 pattern of assump tions 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 belongingin major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely dispara ge, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I cou ld 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, uncomfort­ able, 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 usu­ ally think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the cond itions I have described here work to systematically over-empower certain groups. Such privil ege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex. 

I 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: for example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege of a few. Ideally it is an unearned ad­vantage. 

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 get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantages 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 US think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see whiteness as a racial identity. In additi on, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need simil arly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to national ity, 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 Statement 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 is 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 and the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a smal l 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 systematic 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 me, 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.