WHITE PRIVILEGE: UNPACKING THE INVISIBLE KNAPSACK
By Peggy McIntosh
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 cur-
riculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivi-
leged, 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 cur-
riculum, 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 acknowl-
edged, 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 phe-
nomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white per-
son, 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 priv-
ilege, 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 invis-
ible 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 weight-
less 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.
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My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfair-
ly 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 aver-
age, 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 intri-
cately 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 system-
atically 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 pur-
chasing 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 "civiliza-
tion," 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.
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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 let-
ters, 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 out-
sider.
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.
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23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that peo-
ple 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 differenti-
ated 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 out-
side 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 vio-
lence, 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 dis-
tinguish 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 dam-
aging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your
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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 hold-
ers 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 experi-
ence 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 associ-
ated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentan-
gle 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 oppres-
sions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 contin-
ues 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
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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 avail-
able 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.
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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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