Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf). It’s years old now, so some of it’s out-of-date; but it’s eye-opening nonetheless.
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.
12 responses so far ↓
1 terri // Mar 15, 2008 at 10:53 am
Hey, I lurk around BHT reading the various conversations and this one has made me desperately want to comment, but alas there is no comment function there.
I appreciate your voice of dissent on this issue and agree that people have a difficult time overcoming biases of which they, themselves, are unaware that they hold.
Race relations, particularly in the South, will never be able to extricate itself from its historical roots in slavery. While individuals can most certainly overcome racism and poverty, it takes an enormous effort and determination . What I don’t think people realize is that though blacks theoretically now have the same opportunities as the average white person, they do not have the same amount of societal and cultural support that whites, in general, enjoy. A black individual in an inner-city environment has to fight a lot harder and be far more persistent to “succeed” in certain institutions than the average white person in the suburbs. They must overcome poverty, lack of community support, the occasional racial slights from teachers and authority figures. That is not to say that all teachers and authority figures are racist, but that some are. Add all of those factors together and you have what can seem overwhelming for an individual.
It doesn’t mean that they can’t overcome, it just means that odds are far more daunting than they are for a white middle-class individual.
Systemic poverty and racism that continued for hundreds of years can’t be undone in the spcae of decades. Great strides have been made and continue to be made, but to pretend that racism doesn’t still exist and hasn’t perpetuated the state of poverty which swallows many inner cities, some of which consist almost exclusively of black people, is ridiculous .
An unwillingness to acknowledge this only furthers the inability to talk about race in a constructive way.
2 Travis Prinzi // Mar 15, 2008 at 1:09 pm
terri, thanks for the comment! It’s always helpful to know there are others out there who see it and are still fighting against it. You’re absolutely right. Great strides have been made, but there’s still a long way to go, and that has to be both openly acknowledged and fought against.
3 Michael Spencer // Mar 15, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Travis,
I think you’d be surprised how much we agree, but since I actually have to talk to hundreds of African-American kids about their lives, grades, choices and decisions, I have developed my own approach. I am old enough to have experienced and learned to see privilege and power of every kind, but I don’t see that it makes any difference to my students to teach power relations. I teach empowerment of the individual, and I teach that the is no true power in anger, blame or fatalism. The difference my students can make in their world comes from the choices they make in the face of the realities of disadvantages of various kinds.
4 Travis Prinzi // Mar 15, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Michael, I think as I work through this, I’m realizing the missing piece in what I’m trying to get at. You’re right, there is a lot we agree on. I think we’re coming at it from different angles. I’m coming at it from this angle: in communicating and making friends with my poor black neighbors here in American society, as a white man, how do I position myself in relation to them? I would never encourage a victim mentality in my neighbors; but I think it goes a long way just being honest with them, letting them know that I know I was born into privilege, they were not, that I don’t think that’s fair, and that we need to keep praying and acting that things will change for the better.
5 grub // Mar 15, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Travis,
I don’t know if you saw it, but in the BUffalo News a few weeks ago, there was a special reporton poverty. As it happens, Buffalo is the second poorest (large) city in the United States (after Detroit). Our church plant has chosen to locate in one of the most depressed areas of the city, and we’re looking at building conveniently nestled between two adult video stores. The church was planted by a local megachurch that is located in one of the most priveledged areas of town (williamsville/amherst). So we’ve got a cultural collision of the people who planted and the people who are coming in now. Now, there’s gospel music on Sunday morning (which I despise…sorry), but its there as touchstone for some of the people we’re ministering to. I like seeing Williamsville culture get assimilated and synthesized with Riverside culture.
All of this to say that we’re getting a crash course in with families who are definitely not in the middle class. I work in the children’s ministry, and I hear the stories these kids tell…The effects of poverty are a major component that make up the soup of privilege.
6 lonelypilgrim // Mar 16, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I think there is a lot of merit in what has been said in these posts. Not that I agree with everything, but I think some good points have been made by all.
The point that a black person born into poverty has less chance of success than a white person of middle class birth is valid. Though, I think it has more to do with socioeconomic class than with race it is true that on average more blacks are in poverty than whites. While racism is not the sole, or in my opinion primary, cause of this, it can’t be easily dismissed either.
Here are some thoughts for both black and white living in America. For the moment I’ll just focus on blacks and whites, though Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, Arabs and so forth could be included also.
1. If you are a white person from a middle class background do you think you would have had the same opportunities if you had been black and from a poor background, or even if you were white and from a poor background? In other words do you really think equal opportunity exist for all in the USA?
2. If you are black, from any socioeconomic background would you want to trade places with the average black person from a majority black nation? In other words, even with the racial problems in the USA would you really want to live in an African nation?
3. We’ve been discussing this primarily from a philosophical and political slant. Let’s look at it from a practical and personal angle for a minute. How many, whatever your race, know anybody real well from another race? How many of us who are white have friends who are black, hisspanic, Asian, Arab and so forth? The old saying “Some of my best friends are ______.” How many of us can actually say that? Have we made a good faith effort to get to know someone who is different from us?
4. Every 5 to 7 seconds (depending a which statistics you read) a child dies somewhere in the world either directly or indirectly from hunger. Most of these children are nonWhites. How many of us who are more affluent, whatever our race, our doing anything to stop it (through WorldVision or some other such agency)?
my answers
1. No I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities.
2. I’m not black so I can’t answer this one.
3. I can’t honestly say that at this moment that I know any nonWhites personally, nor have I made a good faith effort to do so.
4. I have done some things through Samaritan’s Purse and giving to the World Hunger fund that the Southern Baptist Convention has. But I have so to speak given out of my many resources, when I could do far more.
I think we need to look at these matters and ask ourselves some tough questions, and try to answer them honestly.
On a totally unrelated note, there are no atheists here in the Bull Dawg nation, as Georgia did the improbably by winning the SEC tournament.
7 Travis Prinzi // Mar 16, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Very, very, very well-said, lonelypilgrim. Thank you.
8 Travis Prinzi // Mar 19, 2008 at 8:08 am
grub, thanks for the comment. I had not seen that article, but I’ll look into it later. I think you’re hitting on some important things here, particularly this:
The effects of poverty are a major component that make up the soup of privilege.
Yes! John Perkins talks about how “racism,” while technically “illegal” now, manifests itself in the concept of the “underclass.” I’m always struck by that line in the film “Lean on Me” - “There are those who want to make blacks a permanent underclass.”
I spent a couple of weeks in Buffalo for an Urban Ministry class several years ago.
9 Brian // Mar 28, 2008 at 10:34 am
White privilege is a function of culture and history. It is not much different from noting Han privilege in China, or Russian privilege in Russia. The difference is that the United States strives to be something more than a nation-state: a state built upon high political ideals of liberty and human rights for everyone.
So we struggle with how our overtly Western culture affects nonwhite citizens. We have found a way to resolve this fairly well in the immigrant experience. The immigrant can view himself both in terms of the history and culture of the land of his ancestors and the proud ideals of his new home. Where we as the white community still struggle in our perception of immigrants is in getting past the notion of whiteness, self-referentially defined, as normative for Americans. We see a Maronite Christian in Houston and think “he’s Lebanese,” rather than “he’s an American of Lebanese descent.”
Blacks have a tougher legacy to overcome, first because they were violently removed from the land and culture of their ancestors. They are cut off from their history. Second, they were systematically excluded from the dominant culture, first through slavery, and then for a century through segregation. The black community was able to respond to this by developing its own culture in order to relate to its surroundings. This culture grew strong until it culminated in the Civil Rights movement.
The white response to the Civil Rights movement, while it may have been well-intentioned, caused great harm to the black community. White America still viewed white society as normative, and thought the solution to segregation was to induct blacks into white society. The “talented tenth” among blacks was immediately able to benefit from access to white society because they had adaptable skills.
However, the larger black community was dependent upon the black socioeconomic infrastructure that had developed in response to segregation, just as the larger white community is dependent upon the normative socioeconomic infrastructure. Since blacks could not patronize white businesses, black businesses existed to serve that market. However, on account of unequal access to capital, the goods and services provided by black businesses were of inferior quality to those of white businesses. Upon integration, since capital access had never been equalized, the black economy was instantly uncompetitive and promptly collapsed.
A good analogy would be Major League Baseball and the Negro Leagues. When baseball integrated, MLB was viewed as normative and superior by the dominant white culture, which patted itself on the back for allowing blacks to play. And, the most talented blacks indeed got to play, and enjoyed success. However, the Negro League promptly collapsed, destroying both the assets of the owners, and the livelihoods of those employed in the Negro Leagues that were not among the “talented tenth.”
It never occurred to anyone to merge the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues together. Even though, as often as not, the Kansas City Monarchs or Homestead Grays could have beaten the New York Yankees or St. Louis Cardinals, they never got that opportunity, and instead saw their best talent and many of their patrons defect to the white game.
Taking into account this understanding of the economic consequences of integration as it was handled, the riots of 1968 start to make sense. The collapse of the black family can be seen in context.
So the black community deals with the consequences of that history still without fully understanding what hit it. It also deals with the reality of being a people whose cultural experience goes no further back than America, without ever being accepted by the dominant culture as truly American. They, in a sense, are aliens in their homeland.
The crux of white privilege is that white Americans can count upon a cultural and socioeconomic infrastructure that caters to them, whereas blacks do not have one of their own anymore, and have to adapt to the white one while simultaneously trying to rebuild theirs. The most talented can adapt, just as the most talented whites would be able to adapt to different cultures, but for the wider groups, whites of average skill have a clear advantage over their black counterparts. This is the reality before the moral aspects of individual racism even come into play.
While it is all well and good to understand this, what is not clear is what can be done to fix it. Would we want to “de-white-ify” the dominant society? Does that make any sense? Is the solution just to rebuild the cultural and socioeconomic infrastructure of the black community? How does that happen? Can wider society even participate in that without causing more harm than good? How does one outside the black community even ponder this without lapsing into paternalism? This is the struggle.
10 Travis Prinzi // Mar 28, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Brian, very, very well said. Thank you.
11 k.t. // Apr 30, 2008 at 1:13 am
whoop-t do! Much ado about nothing.
12 Travis Prinzi // Apr 30, 2008 at 7:05 am
Let me guess. White?
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