White Privilege

This week I re-read Peggy McIntosh’s article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I had read it a few times before, and the point that always stands out to me is the line that reads, “Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal….” I occasionally realize that I have this exact attitude when I recognize that “white” is not really a part of how I identify myself. There is nothing inherently valuable (I seem to have learned) in my race, so I don’t tend to count it among the things that make me proud of who I am. And yet, this is so because I inadvertently see myself as the default, the norm, the “average” as McIntosh says. This was put into stark contrast by my experience in grad school class last week when a colleague – the only person of color in the room – was the only one to include race in her answer to a warm-up icebreaker that asked, “Who are you?”

I say that I see myself as the default. In fact, McIntosh suggests that the reason I can see myself that way is because my position of power in society allows me to have that perception. If I wanted, I could enumerate the ways in which my profile represents not the default, but rather the top of the power totem pole. My racial identity would be at the top of that list, and here's a partial list of others:

1. I’ve never thought I was disadvantaged or missing out on anything because of my gender.
2. Financially, I’ve never wanted for anything substantial (even now as an adult).
3. It is legal for me to marry the person I love in any state. (See article on "Straight Privilege" for similar points along these lines.)
   
4. I can travel almost anywhere in the world and be fairly confident that I can find people who speak English – my first (and only) language.
5. I am not the first in my family to go to college.
6. I am not the first in my family born in the U.S.
7. My doctor says I’m physically and mentally fit. I have health insurance that pays for her telling me that.
8. I can walk into most affluent neighborhoods and not feel out of place. (This one is the product of many of the above points combined.)
9. I get most of my religious holidays off without having to request them.
   

I want to stop here to note that I originally intended this to be a list of the ways in which my profile does, in fact, represent the type which is perceived as normative and average in the us/them dynamic of which McIntosh speaks. It wasn’t until I had written about half of the list that I realized I was actually making a list of the social advantages of my power position. (I added the second sentence in the paragraph above once I had made that realization.)

At the CES Small Schools conference (see my post about the 2008 Winter Meeting) last month, I listened to Camilla Greene talk about the stages that many white, privileged educators must go through in order to become effective advocates for change in school systems. The first step, obviously, is awareness. One of the next steps, though, is often guilt and shame. I admit that I'm still (in many ways) working through this stage, but I can see the progress I've made and the ways in which I am starting to envision my position of privilege as a powerful tool for enacting the change I hope to see. As Dr. Anthony Clark (Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, Innovation and Social Justice for the San Francisco Unified School District; also an affluent, white male) said, he encounters colleagues of color who often tell him that they've been saying for ten years the same things that he says, but when he says them, people listen.

References:
McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Wellesley: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.