White Privilege:  Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
By Peggy Macintosh

Published in Independent School, Wellesly College Center for Research on Women, Wellesly, MA 02181
Winter 1990

	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 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 that amount to taboos surround the subject of
 advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages.  These denials protect 
mail 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 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.


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 can count on cashing 
in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious.  White 
privilege is like an invisible knapsack of special provision, 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 
describe 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, and 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.”


Daily Effects of White Privilege
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 these conditions that I 
think in my case attack somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class 
religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these 
other factors are intricately intertwined.   As far as I can tell, my African 
American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with who I come into daily or 
frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count 
on most of these conditions.

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 of renting or purchasing 
housing in an area that 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 “civilization,” 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.
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 that fit with my 
cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal 
with 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 letters 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 being called a 
credit to my race.
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 with being seen as a cultural outsider.
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.
23. 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.
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 that more or less 
match my skin.

Elusive and fugitive
	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 that 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 that were passed on to me as a white person.  There was 
one main piece of cultural turf: it was my own turn, and I was among those who 
could control the turn.  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 can ignore, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside 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 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 a being a favored stated, 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.

	Earned strength, unearned power
 	I wanted, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned 
power conferred systemically.  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 us, 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 advantage, 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 that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United 
States 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 United States 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 advantages 
associated with them should not be seen as the same.  In addition, it is hard 
to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that 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 member of the 
Combahee River Collective pointed out in their “Black Feminist Statement” of 
1977.


	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 they 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 to first 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 subjects taboo.  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 the 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.


	Although systemic changes 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.

By Peggy Macintosh

Published in Independent School, Wellesly College Center for Research on Women, Wellesly, MA 02181
Winter 1990