Response Post Feb. 9

The reading that moved me most today was Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. I took a psychology class called “Race, Racism, and Film” last spring, and we read this article in that class. The professor read some of the statements about white privilege that McIntosh enumerates, and my classmates and I wrote down if we felt the same way as McIntosh or not. We found that, consistent with McIntosh’s argument, white people could identify with the statements much more frequently than people of color.

McIntosh’s article is important for a number of reasons. Because I have read it before, I was not as affected by it the second time around. However, as a white woman, I remember how the article affected me the first time I read it last spring. Her enumerated list is extremely powerful because it makes white people think about “white privilege” in a different way. Before reading the article, I never thought about how people of color may not be able to find band-aids that match their skin tone, or feel that their skin color works against their financial credibility. McIntosh brings up many ideas that I think many white people have never considered before. While I’m fairly confident that most white people have never considered themselves privileged when they are not followed around a store by the salesperson who accuses them of stealing, I’m confident that many people of color have thought about (and encountered) this experience.

One of the points that McIntosh makes is “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group”. This reminded me of a specific class that I took while I studied abroad in Barcelona, Spain last semester. The program that I was on was extremely homogenous with very little diversity. In a psychology class that I took abroad, there were two African Americans, and we discussed the psychology of racism frequently in that class. For some reason, every SINGLE time that we talked about racial minorities, the professor turned to the African American male in the class and asked him about his “experience” as a minority. The student always handled it well and kept his cool, but if I were him I would have been furious. He should not have been responsible for providing the perspective of a racial minority just because he was one of the few minorities in the classroom. I wonder if that professor has read Peggy McIntosh’s article about white privilege (the professor was white)…something tells me, he has not.

Finally, I want to relate this article to women’s studies, not just to race. McIntosh touches on the fact that men also have an “invisible backpack” full of privileges that they receive just for being men, the same way that white people have privileges just because they are white. I think that if we unpacked this male backpack, we would find a number of items, including: Power in (romantic) relationships, higher pay, more respect in the workplace, less responsibility for housework, and more respect in the departments of math and sciences…just to name a few.