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And that’s why intentionally thinking about your whiteness is usually an eye-opening experience. When I ask whites to do this, the response is almost always, “I don’t think of myself as white!” or “When I see people, I don’t see colors.” Exactly.

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* In her book Racing Across the Lines (read my review Here and note her response), Deborah Plummer asks whites to go around for a full day thinking of themselves as white.

#6 and #26 seem to define the macro-micro ends of a spectrum, though on an everyday level, I’m not sure that #26 isn’t as big-the point being that people of color have to think about things like this that whites rarely do. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chose.Ģ6. 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.Ģ3. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.ġ9. 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.ġ4. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.ġ2. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.Ĩ. Perhaps most famously she lists over 50 “items” in the Invisible Knapsack. White privilege is like an invisible, weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” “I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege,” she wrote, “as males are taught not to recognize male 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.

It was only a short step to connect the issue to race. “These denials,” she continues in her famous essay, “protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended,” and blind us to the “advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages.” “I was taught,” she writes, “to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” As associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, she began thinking of privilege as a male/female matter and was struck by “men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged.” Peggy McIntosh, a white woman, wrote the influential essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” perhaps the most succinct analysis of white privilege yet written.

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GO HERE for an updated official copy, and at the very end of this pdf, please note the proviso that you may not print more than 35 copies, nor post the pdf itself, without prior permission. McIntosh (see a brief bio below), these versions are all pirated and unofficial. McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” at many places on the web, but according to the Wellesley Centers for Women’s website, on the page featuring Dr.

Invisible knapsack