"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 women's statues, 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, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are
interlocking, there was 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 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 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 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 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 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 time 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 purchasing
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 someone 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
tolerate 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 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.
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
policies 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, post-cards, 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 feeling
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 consequences
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
professional, 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
feelings 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 attention
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 chose 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 embarrassment
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 domestic
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 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 patter
of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one
main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, 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 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 systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege
simply 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 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
that I originally say 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 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 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 angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are
many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages
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 that 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 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
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 system 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 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 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 subject 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 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.
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.
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.
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent
School.
| 
