WHITE PRIVILEGE AND MALE PRIVILEGE - ehcounseling

1 WHITE PRIVILEGE AND MALE PRIVILEGEA Personal Account of Comingto See Correspondences Through Workin Women's StudiesPeggy McIntoshThrough work to bring materials and perspectives from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged in the curriculum, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. 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 recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended. Thinking through unacknowledged male PRIVILEGE as a phenomenon with a life of its own, 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, but alive and real in its effects.

2 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 . This paper is a partial record of my personal observations and not a scholarly analysis. It is based on my daily experiences within my particular circumstances. 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, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank I have had trouble facing WHITE PRIVILEGE , and describing its results in my life, I saw parallels here with men's reluctance to acknowledge male PRIVILEGE .

3 Only rarely will a man go beyond acknowledging that women are disadvantaged to acknowledging that men have unearned advantage, or that unearned PRIVILEGE has not been good for men's development as human beings, or for society's development, or that PRIVILEGE systems might ever be challenged and will review here several types or layers of denial that I see at work protecting, and preventing awareness about, entrenched male PRIVILEGE . Then I will draw parallels, from my own experience, with the denials that veil the facts of WHITE PRIVILEGE . Finally, I will list forty six ordinary and daily ways in which I experience having WHITE PRIVILEGE , by contrast with my African American colleagues in the same building. This list is not intended to be generalizable. Others can make their own lists from within their own life of 11 WHITE PRIVILEGE AND MALE PRIVILEGEW riting this paper has been difficult, despite warm receptions for the talks on which it is based.

4 1 For describing WHITE PRIVILEGE makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work reveal male PRIVILEGE and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having WHITE PRIVILEGE must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"The denial of men's over privileged state takes many forms in discussions of curriculum change work. Some claim that men must be central in the curriculum because they have done most of what is important or distinctive in life or in civilization. Some recognize sexism in the curriculum but deny that it makes male students seem unduly important in life. Others agree that certain individual thinkers are male oriented but deny that there is any systemic tendency in disciplinary frameworks or epistemology to over empower men as a group. Those men who do grant that male PRIVILEGE takes institutionalized and embedded forms are still likely to deny that male hegemony has opened doors for them personally.

5 Virtually all men deny that male over reward alone can explain men's centrality in all the inner sanctums of our most powerful institutions. Moreover, those few who will acknowledge that male PRIVILEGE systems have over empowered them usually end up doubting that we could dismantle these PRIVILEGE systems. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society or in the university, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. In curricular terms, this is the point at which they say that they regret they cannot use any of the interesting new scholarship on women because of the syllabus is full. When the talk turns to giving men less cultural room, even the most thoughtful and fair-minded of the men I know will tend to reflect, or fall back on, conservative assumptions about the inevitability of present gender relations and distributions of power, calling on precedent or sociobiology and [psychobiology] to demonstrate that male domination is natural and follows inevitably from evolutionary pressures.

6 Others resort to arguments from "experience" or religion or social responsibility or wishing and I realized, through faculty development work in Women's Studies, 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. At the very least, obliviousness of one's privileged state can make a person or group irritating to be with. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin PRIVILEGE and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence, unable to see that it put me "ahead" in any way, or put my people ahead, over rewarding us and yet also paradoxically damaging us, or that it could or should be schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture.

7 I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. At school, we 2 of 11 WHITE PRIVILEGE AND MALE PRIVILEGE were not taught about slavery in any depth; we were not taught to see slaveholders as damaged people. Slaves were seen as the only group at risk of being dehumanized. My schooling followed the pattern which Elizabeth Minnich has point our: 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." I think many of us know how obnoxious this attitude can be in frustration with men who would not recognize male PRIVILEGE , I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of WHITE PRIVILEGE in my life.

8 It is crude work, at this stage, but I will give here a list of special circumstances and conditions I experience that I did not earn but that I have been made to feel are mine by birth, by citizenship, and by virtue of being a conscientious law-abiding "normal" person of goodwill. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color PRIVILEGE than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though these other privileging factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my Afro-American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to I can go shopping alone most of the time.

9 Fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on WHITE I can be fairly sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another woman's voice in a group in which she is the only member of her of 11 WHITE PRIVILEGE AND MALE PRIVILEGE12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing 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 13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially I could arrange to protect our young children most of the time from people who might not like I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection. 16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. 19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural I can be reasonably sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my 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 I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys.