I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
I actually live in South Park. And there sure are a lot of mexicans. But South Park Mexican isn't from my neighborhood.
The weird thing is that most people in San Diego have never even heard of South Park (the neighborhood). They're always like "where is South Park"? and I'm like "Uh, its south of North Park" and then they think I am kidding and its like dammit, i live in fucking south park and its awesome.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading Is Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading Is Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
Where is that head pounding a brick wall graemlin?
I'm done. I don't even wanna bring up the term, "_____ __________" or about how foreign born Blacks are at an advantage over blah blah blah and how filters apply with immigration that didn't not apply with the diaspora spreading through slavery, blah, blah, blah.
You just don't/won't understand and I'm ok with that.
I actually live in South Park. And there sure are a lot of mexicans. But South Park Mexican isn't from my neighborhood.
The weird thing is that most people in San Diego have never even heard of South Park (the neighborhood). They're always like "where is South Park"? and I'm like "Uh, its south of North Park" and then they think I am kidding and its like dammit, i live in fucking south park and its awesome.
Hell - I used to live in South Park and got the same thing. I'm in Oceanside now, but I miss that neighborhood. Great houses all around.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading Is Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
Where is that head pounding a brick wall graemlin?
I'm done. I don't even wanna bring up the term, "_____ __________" or about how foreign born Blacks are at an advantage over blah blah blah and how filters apply with immigration that didn't not apply with the diaspora spreading through slavery, blah, blah, blah.
You just don't/won't understand and I'm ok with that.
Here's what I understand....there is tremendous colorblind economic discrimination in this country.
There are people who throw out the race card like it's a Royal Flush and is unfuckwithable but when they are called on it they say "You're white you just wouldn't understand".
There was a time in this country when a black man could not vote, go to school, eat at a restaurant, marry whomever they pleased, etc. etc. Those days are over.
If a HUMAN drops out of school or doesn't strive for an education their life is gonna be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN becomes a parent at an early age their life is going to be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN is accused of a crime and doesn't have enough money to afford a good lawyer there's a good chance they will become a victim of the system.
If a HUMAN doesn't have a stable home life with loving parents who teach them values and morals their life is gonna be harder than those who do.
It doesn't matter if these HUMANS are green, purple black or blue.
Now just give me ONE example where a BLACK man or any other minority are discriminated against strictly because of their race that will have an effect on the outcome of their life.
I actually live in South Park. And there sure are a lot of mexicans. But South Park Mexican isn't from my neighborhood.
The weird thing is that most people in San Diego have never even heard of South Park (the neighborhood). They're always like "where is South Park"? and I'm like "Uh, its south of North Park" and then they think I am kidding and its like dammit, i live in fucking south park and its awesome.
pretty funny, i got a south park mexican promo from depaul's radio station when i used to do a show there.
isn't the south park show based on a fictional city in colorado?
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading Is Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
Where is that head pounding a brick wall graemlin?
I'm done. I don't even wanna bring up the term, "_____ __________" or about how foreign born Blacks are at an advantage over blah blah blah and how filters apply with immigration that didn't not apply with the diaspora spreading through slavery, blah, blah, blah.
You just don't/won't understand and I'm ok with that.
Here's what I understand....there is tremendous colorblind economic discrimination in this country.
There are people who throw out the race card like it's a Royal Flush and is unfuckwithable but when they are called on it they say "You're white you just wouldn't understand".
There was a time in this country when a black man could not vote, go to school, eat at a restaurant, marry whomever they pleased, etc. etc. Those days are over.
If a HUMAN drops out of school or doesn't strive for an education their life is gonna be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN becomes a parent at an early age their life is going to be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN is accused of a crime and doesn't have enough money to afford a good lawyer there's a good chance they will become a victim of the system.
If a HUMAN doesn't have a stable home life with loving parents who teach them values and morals their life is gonna be harder than those who do.
It doesn't matter if these HUMANS are green, purple black or blue.
Now just give me ONE example where a BLACK man or any other minority are discriminated against strictly because of their race that will have an effect on the outcome of their life.
All respect to you Rockadelic, but you really are missing the bigger picture and I understand why cashless doesn't want to get into it that much. Please take time to read the following.
R.I.F.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Daily effects of white privilege Elusive and fugitive Earned strength, unearned power "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
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 overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, 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 male 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 are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while 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 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, 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 described 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 just 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, as 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."
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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 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 of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time 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. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. 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 live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. 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 which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my 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 race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. 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.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. 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.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. 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.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
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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 patter 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 turf. 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 could freely disparage, fear, 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 being a favored state, 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.
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Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred 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 you, 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 say 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 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 angers 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 that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members 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 groups 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 the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. 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 first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political 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 subject 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 that 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 change 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, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
I've been pulled over MANY times because of what I look like....I've been asked to leave restaurants because of what I look like.....I've had my children come home from school in tears and tell me that their teacher said I was SATANIC because of what I look like.
Sounds like all you need is a haircut and a shave. That won't work for me. It's not the same. You don't even understand the basic nature of what we're talking about.
From my experience the brothers that dress and act like Urkel don't get harrassed by the police...maybe that's all you need??
And that would be YOUR experience... and how do you know how I dress? Are you stereotyping me as some baggy pant wearing lil wayne wanna be?
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s) Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading Is Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
Where is that head pounding a brick wall graemlin?
I'm done. I don't even wanna bring up the term, "_____ __________" or about how foreign born Blacks are at an advantage over blah blah blah and how filters apply with immigration that didn't not apply with the diaspora spreading through slavery, blah, blah, blah.
You just don't/won't understand and I'm ok with that.
Here's what I understand....there is tremendous colorblind economic discrimination in this country.
There are people who throw out the race card like it's a Royal Flush and is unfuckwithable but when they are called on it they say "You're white you just wouldn't understand".
There was a time in this country when a black man could not vote, go to school, eat at a restaurant, marry whomever they pleased, etc. etc. Those days are over.
If a HUMAN drops out of school or doesn't strive for an education their life is gonna be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN becomes a parent at an early age their life is going to be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN is accused of a crime and doesn't have enough money to afford a good lawyer there's a good chance they will become a victim of the system.
If a HUMAN doesn't have a stable home life with loving parents who teach them values and morals their life is gonna be harder than those who do.
It doesn't matter if these HUMANS are green, purple black or blue.
Now just give me ONE example where a BLACK man or any other minority are discriminated against strictly because of their race that will have an effect on the outcome of their life.
All respect to you Rockadelic, but you really are missing the bigger picture and I understand why cashless doesn't want to get into it that much. Please take time to read the following.
R.I.F.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Daily effects of white privilege Elusive and fugitive Earned strength, unearned power "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
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 overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, 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 male 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 are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while 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 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, 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 described 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 just 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, as 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."
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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 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 of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time 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. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. 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 live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. 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 which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my 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 race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. 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.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. 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.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. 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.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
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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 destruct
ive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter 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 turf. 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 could freely disparage, fear, 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 being a favored state, 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.
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Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred 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 you, 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 say 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 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 angers 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 that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members 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 groups 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 the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. 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 first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political 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 subject 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 that 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 change 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, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
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I'm not buying....and you don't have to understand...I'm OK with that.
So I figured out how to handle this Isaac Hayes/chef/south park/scientology issue. Just make chef a headwound victim and he can still work in the cafeteria. Scooping potatoes and drooling.......
So I figured out how to handle this Isaac Hayes/chef/south park/scientology issue. Just make chef a headwound victim and he can still work in the cafeteria. Scooping potatoes and drooling.......
How's about if they have Chef get kidnapped by Tom Cruise who then forces him to have sex with Katie Holmes to produce another Scientology Alien Baby.
So I figured out how to handle this Isaac Hayes/chef/south park/scientology issue. Just make chef a headwound victim and he can still work in the cafeteria. Scooping potatoes and drooling.......
How's about if they have Chef get kidnapped by Tom Cruise who then forces him to have sex with Katie Holmes to produce another Scientology Alien Baby.
So I figured out how to handle this Isaac Hayes/chef/south park/scientology issue. Just make chef a headwound victim and he can still work in the cafeteria. Scooping potatoes and drooling.......
How's about if they have Chef get kidnapped by Tom Cruise who then forces him to have sex with Katie Holmes to produce another Scientology Alien Baby.
I was thinking of a way to deal with him without a lawsuit from scientology but still make him look stupid...
Comments
Really.....that word's "off limits".......I'll be in Austin in 2 weeks if anyone has the inclination to come kick my ass.
For all you know I may have a face covered in tattoos and the shave and a haircut won't work either.......we're even.
Time to start rocking one of these.
The weird thing is that most people in San Diego have never even heard of South Park (the neighborhood). They're always like "where is South Park"? and I'm like "Uh, its south of North Park" and then they think I am kidding and its like dammit, i live in fucking south park and its awesome.
Dude my ass is so big I have those babies built in!!!!
You just played yourself: cashless looks exactly like Urkel.
Either way it was a decision on your part to look the way you do/did. Sorry still not the same.
ink gun < genetics
Yep...and he can't go outside his house without getting abused....hmmmmm.
Police abuse me = Isolated incident(s)
Police abuse you = Racism
I've been schooled.
R.I.F.
I thought we were beyond that racism is not an act solely committed by police? guess not.
Reading
Is
Fundamental
R.I.G.D.F.
You gave one specific example...it was the Police...I gave one specific example and it was the Police.
You want to expound the belief that racism is rampant and effects you tremendously.
My question to you is this, what is it in 2006 that you, as a human being, will not be able to accomplish with your life, that I as a white man in America can??
This is a serious question with hopes of a serious answer.
My very strong belief is that ANYONE who strives for an education and works hard can accomplish anything they want regardless of race/color/creed in today's America.
How else could my friend who comes from abject poverty and societal abuse in Nigeria come to America and become a successful doctor.
And please remember I do not consider me being turned down for the lead role in The Wilt Chamberlain Story flick as being racist.
oh yeh? R.I.F.!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where is that head pounding a brick wall graemlin?
I'm done. I don't even wanna bring up the term, "_____ __________" or about how foreign born Blacks are at an advantage over blah blah blah and how filters apply with immigration that didn't not apply with the diaspora spreading through slavery, blah, blah, blah.
You just don't/won't understand and I'm ok with that.
Hell - I used to live in South Park and got the same thing.
I'm in Oceanside now, but I miss that neighborhood.
Great houses all around.
Here's what I understand....there is tremendous colorblind economic discrimination in this country.
There are people who throw out the race card like it's a Royal Flush and is unfuckwithable but when they are called on it they say "You're white you just wouldn't understand".
There was a time in this country when a black man could not vote, go to school, eat at a restaurant, marry whomever they pleased, etc. etc. Those days are over.
If a HUMAN drops out of school or doesn't strive for an education their life is gonna be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN becomes a parent at an early age their life is going to be alot harder than those who don't.
If a HUMAN is accused of a crime and doesn't have enough money to afford a good lawyer there's a good chance they will become a victim of the system.
If a HUMAN doesn't have a stable home life with loving parents who teach them values and morals their life is gonna be harder than those who do.
It doesn't matter if these HUMANS are green, purple black or blue.
Now just give me ONE example where a BLACK man or any other minority are discriminated against strictly because of their race that will have an effect on the outcome of their life.
pretty funny, i got a south park mexican promo from depaul's radio station when i used to do a show there.
isn't the south park show based on a fictional city in colorado?
All respect to you Rockadelic, but you really are missing the bigger picture and I understand why cashless doesn't want to get into it that much. Please take time to read the following.
R.I.F.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Daily effects of white privilege
Elusive and fugitive
Earned strength, unearned power
"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
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 overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, 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 male 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 are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while 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 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, 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 described 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 just 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, as 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."
Return to the top of the page
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 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 of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time 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. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. 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 live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. 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 which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my 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 race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. 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.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. 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.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. 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.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
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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 patter 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 turf. 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 could freely disparage, fear, 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 being a favored state, 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.
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Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred 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 you, 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 say 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 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 angers 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 that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members 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 groups 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 the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. 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 first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political 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 subject 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 that 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 change 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, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
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I'm not buying....and you don't have to understand...I'm OK with that.
How's about if they have Chef get kidnapped by Tom Cruise who then forces him to have sex with Katie Holmes to produce another Scientology Alien Baby.
I was thinking of a way to deal with him without a lawsuit from scientology but still make him look stupid...
That's the thing.. She really doesn't. She's just being her.
I never got into South Park. It always seemed like they tried to hard to be stupid in a "smart" way.