White Privilege:Unpacking the

Invisible Knapsack

I was taught to see racism onIy in individual acts of meanness, not.. in invisiblesystemsconferringdominanceon my group.

Through work to bringmaterials from women's studies intothe rest of the curriculum, I have oftennoticed men's unwillingness to grantthat they are overprivileged, eventhough they may grant that women aredisadvantaged. They may say they willwork to improve women's status, in thesociety, the university, or thecurriculum, but they can't or won'tsupport the idea of lessening men's.Denials that amount to taboossurround the subject of advantages thatmen gain from women's disadvantages.These denials protect male privilegefrom being fully acknowledged,lessened, or ended.

Thinking throughunacknowledged male privilege as aphenomenon, I realized that, sincehierarchies in our society. areinterlocking, there was most likely aphenomenon of white privilege thatwas similarly denied and protected. Asa white person, I realized I had beentaught about racism as something thatputs others at a disadvantage, but hadbeen taught not to see one of itscorollary aspects, white privilege, whichputs me at an advantage.

Peggy McIntosh

I think whites are carefullytaught not to recognize white privilege,as males are taught not to recognizemale privilege. So I have begun in anuntutored way to ask what it is like tohave white privilege. I have come tosee white privilege as an invisiblepackage of unearned assets that I cancount on cashing in each day, butabout which I was "meant" to remain

oblivious. White privilege is like aninvisibleweightlessknapsack of special .

provisions, maps, passports, codebooks,visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

Describing white privilegemakes one newly accountable. As wein women's studies work to reveal maleprivilege and ask men to give up someof their power, so one who writesabout having whiteprivilege must ask,"Having described it, what will I do tolessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent towhich men work from a base of

unacknowledged privilege, I understoodthat much of their oppressiveness wasunconscious. Then I remembered the

frequent charges from women of colorthat white women whom theyencounter are oppressive. I began to

....

understand why we are justly seen asoppressive, even when we don't ~eourselves that way. I began to countthe ways in which I enjoy unearnedskin privilege. and have beenconditioned into oblivion about itsexistence.

My schooling gave me notraining in seeing myself as anoppressor, as an unfairly advantagedperson, or as a participant in a

.- damaged culture. I was taught to seemyself as an individual whose moralstate depended on her individual moralwilL My schooling followed the patternmy colleague Elizabeth Minnich haspointed out: whites are taught to thinkof their lives as morally neutral,normative, and average, and also ideal,so that when we work to benefitothers, this is seen as work that willallow "themll to be more like IIUS.II

Daily effects of white privilege

I decided to try to work onmyself at least by identifying some ofthe daily effects of white privilege inmy life. I have chosen those conditionsthat I think in my case attachsomewhat more to skin-color privilege

than to class, religion, ethnic status, orgeographic location, though of courseall these other factors are intricatelyintertwined. As far as I can tell, myAfrican American co-workers, friends,and acquaintances with whom I comeinto daily or frequent contact in thisparticular time, place, and line of workcannot count on most of theseconditions.

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to bein the company of people of my racemost of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I canbe pretty sure of renting or purchasinghousing in an area that I can affordand in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that myneighbors in such a location will beneutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone mostof the time, pretty well assured that Iwill not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or

open to the front page of the paperand see people of my race widelyrepresented.

6. When I am told about ournational heritage or about "civilization",I am shown that people of my colormade it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my childrenwill be given curricular materials thattestify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be prettysure of finding a publisher for thispiece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop andcount on finding the music of my racerepresented, into a supermarket andfind the staple foods that fit with mycultural traditions, into a hair dresser'sshop and find someone who can dealwith my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, creditcards, or cash, I can count on my skincolor not to work against theappearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect mychildren most of the time from peoplewho might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress insecond-hand clothes, or not answerletters without having people attributethese choices to the bad morals, thepoverty, or the illiteracyof my race.

13. I can speak in public to apowerful male group without puttingmy race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challengingsituation without being called a creditto my race.

15. I am never asked to speak forall the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of thelanguage and customs of persons ofcolor, who constitute the world'smajority,without feeling in my cultureany penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our governmentand talk about how much I fear its

policies and behavior without beingseen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that If Iask to talk to "the person in charge" Iwill be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over,or if the IRS audits my tax return, Ican be sure I haven't been singled outbecause of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, picturebooks, greeting cards, dolls, toys, andchildren's magazines featuring peopleof my race.

21. I can go home from mostmeetings of organizations I belong tofeeling 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 anaffirmative action employer withouthaving coworkers on the job suspectthat I got it because of race.

23. I can choose publicaccommodation without fearing thatpeople of my race cannot get in or willbe mistreated in the places I havechosen.

24. I can be sure that if I needlegal or medical help my race will notwork against me. .

25. If my day, week, or year isgoing badly, I need not ask of eachnegative episode or situation whether ithas racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover orbandages in "flesh" color that more orless match my skin.

Elusive and fugitive

I repeatedly forgot each of therealizations on this list until I wrote itdown. For me white privilege hasturned out to be an elusive and fugitivesubject. The pressure to avoid it is

- - great, for in facing it -I must give upthe myth of meritocracy. If thesethings .are true, this is not such a freecountry; one's life is not what onemakes it; many doors open for certainpeople through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisibleknapsack of white privilege, I havelisted conditions of daily experiencethat I once took for granted. Nor didI think of any of these perquisites asbad for the holder. I now think thatwe need a more finely differentiatedtaxonomy of privilege, for some ofthese varieties are ollIy what one wouldwant for everyone in a just society, andothers give license to be ignorant,oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.

I see a pattern running throughthe matrix of white privilege, a patternof assumptions that were passed on tome as a white person. There was onemain piece of cultural turf; it was myown turf, and I was among those whocould control the turf. My skin colorwas an asset for any move I waseducated to want to make. I couldthink of myself as belonging in majorways and of making social systemswork for me. I could freely disparage,fear, neglect, or be oblivious toanything outside of the dominantcultural forms. Being of the mainculture, I could also criticize it fairlyfreely.

In proportion as my racialgroup was being made confident,comfortable, and oblivious, othergroups were likely being madeunconfident, uncomfortable, andalienated. Whiteness protected mefrom many kinds of hostility, distress,and violence, which I was being subtlytrained to visit, in turn, upon people ofcolor.

For this reason, the word"privilege" now seems to me misleading.We usually think of privilege as being afavored state, whether earned orconferred by birth or luck. Yet someof the conditions I have described here

work systematically to over-empowercertain groups. Such privilege simplyconfers dominance because of one'srace or sex.

Earned strength, unearned power

I want, then, to distinguishbetween earned strength and unearnedpower conferred systemically. Powerfrom unearned privilege can look likestrength when it is in fact permission toescape or to dominate. But not all ofthe privileges on my list are inevitablydamaging. Some, like the expectationthat neighbors will be decent to you, orthat your race will not count againstyou in court, should be the norm in ajust society. Others, like the privilege

to ignore less powerful people, distortthe humanity of the holders as well asthe ignored groups.

We might at least start bydistinguishing between positiveadvantages, which we can work tospread, and negative types ofadvantage, which unless rejected willalways reinforce our presenthierarchies. For example, the feelingthat one belongs within the humancircle, as Native Americans say, shouldnot be seen as privilege for a few.Ideally it is an unearned entitl,ement.At present, since only a few have it, itis an unearned advantage for them.This paper results from a process ofcoming to see that some of the powerthat I originally saw as attendant onbeing a human being in the UnitedStates consisted in unearned advantageand conferred dominance. .

I have met very few men whoare truly distressed about systemic,unearned male advantage andconferred dominance. And so one

question for me and others like me iswhether we will be like them, orwhether we will get truly distressed,even outraged, about unearned raceadvantage and conferred dominance,and, if so, what. we will do to lessenthem. In any case, we need to do morework in identifying how they actuallyaffect our daily lives. Many, perhapsmost, of our white students in theUnited States think that racism doesn'taffect them because they are notpeople of color; they do not see"whiteness" as a racial identity. Inaddition, since race and sex are not theonly advantaging systems at work, weneed similarly to examine the dailyexperience of having age advantage, orethnic advantage, or physical ability, oradvantage related to nationality,religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangerssurrounding the task of findingparallels are many. Since racism,sexism, and hetero sexism are not the

same, the advantages associated withthem should not be seen as the same.In addition, it is hard to disentangleaspects of unearned advantage thatrest more on social class, economicclass,race, religion, sex, and ethnicidentity than on other factors. Still, allof the oppressions are interlocking, asthe members of the Combahee RiverCollective pointed out in their "BlackFeminist Statement" of 1977.

One factor seems clear about

all of the interlocking oppressions.They take both active .forms, which wecan see, and embedded forms, which asa member of the dominant group oneis taught not to see. In my class andplace, I did not see myself as a racistbecause I was taught to recognizeracism only in individual acts ofmeanness by members of my group,never ininvisible systems conferringunsought racial dominance on mygroup from birth.

Disapproving of the systemswon't be enough to change them. Iwas taught to think that racism couldend if white individuals changed theirattitudes. But a "white" skin in the

United States opens many doors forwhites whether or not we approve ofthe way dominance has been conferred

. - on us. Individual acts can palliate, butcannot end these problems.

To redesign social systems weneed first to acknowledge their colossalunseen dimensions. The silences and

denials surrounding privilege are thekey political tool here. They keep thethinking about equality or equityincomplete, protecting unearnedadvantage and conferred dominance bymaking these subjects taboo. Most talkby whites about equal opportunityseems to me now to be about equalopportunity to try to get into a positionof dominance while denying thatsystems of dominance exist.

It seems to me thatobliviousness about white advantage,

like obliviousness about maleadvantage, is kept strongly inculturatedin the United States so as to maintainthe myth of meritocracy, the myth thatdemocratic choice is equally availableto all. Keeping most people unawarethat freedom of confident action isthere for just a small number of peopleprops up those in power and serves tokeep power in the hands of the samegroups that have most of it already.

Although systemic changetakes many decades, there are pressingquestions for me and, I imagine, forsome others like me if we raise ourdaily consciousness on the perquisitesof being light-skinned. What will wedo with such knowledge? As we knowfrom watching men, it is an openquestion whether we will choose to useunearned advantage to weaken hiddensystems of advantage, and whether wewill use any or our arbitrarily awardedpower to try to reconstruct powersystems on a broader base.

Peggy McIntosh is associatedirector of the WeUesley College Centerfor Research on Women. This essay isexcerpted from Working Paper 189,"White Privilege and Male Privilege: APersonal Account of Coming To SeeCorrespondences through Work inWomen's Studid'(1988), by PeggyMcIntosh; available for $4.00 from theWellesley College Center for Researchon Women, Wellesley MA 02181. Theworking paper contains a longer list ofprivileges.

Permission to copy anddistribute this article was given by theauthor to the Equal OpportunityAffirmative Action Department of theUniversity of Minnesota.

This excerpted essayis reprintedhere from the July/August 1989 issue ofPeace and Freedom, the bimonthlyjpumal of the Women's InternationalLeague for Peace and Freedom, basedat 1213 Race St., Philadelphia PA19107.