Understanding Whitness, Recognizing Priviledge:
A Conference Towards Racial Justice
Hampshire College
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance
on my group
Peggy McIntosh
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.
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