White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack
by Peggy McIntosh
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. Denials 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 realized I had been taught about racism as something 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 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 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, 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 a 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
attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege that 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
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 can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the
time. - 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. - I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or
pleasant to me. - I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not
be followed or harassed. - I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented. - When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am
shown that people of my color made it what it is. - I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to
the existence of their race. - If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white
privilege. - 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. - Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to
work against the appearance of financial reliability. - I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might
not like them. - 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. - I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
- I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
- I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
- 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. - I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and
behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider. - 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. - 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. - I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys,
and children’s magazine featuring people of my race. - I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling some-
what tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held
at a distance, or feared. - I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers
on the job suspect that I got it because of race. - 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. - I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against
me. - If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode
or situation whether it has racial overtones. - 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 realization 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
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 free.
In proportion as my racial group was being make confident, comfortable, and
oblivious, other groups were likely being made less confident, 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 to systematically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege 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 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 of a few.
Ideally it is an 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
is whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage
and conferred dominance and it 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
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 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 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.
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.