"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
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 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 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.
...
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."
...
(She lists 50 Daily Effects of White Privilege that I can't paste per copyright rules)
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.Read the full thing here:
http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html - note that there are a couple glitches from whoever tried to scan this from the journal, but you'll be able to read past them.
Comments:
People who talk about "reverse racism" need to be extremely cautious when throwing that term around. Not serving someone because they are white, hurling racial slurs against whites in hatred - those things are bad. Criticizing white people's privilege or the culture of white dominance does not require the qualification "some white people" because
all white people participate whether they choose to or not by back of being born in America. When you were born white in America, you inherited over-privilege, and over-privilege comes at the expense of someone else's privilege. You were born into a society of white dominance.
It isn't "racist" to accurately describe the cultural and societal reality of white privilege.
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