Which is pretty offensive if you’re a victim of America’s opioid epidemic known as the “white death” because it disproportionately affects white people in the American South. That is, she has led such a pampered existence and had so little contact with people outside her Harvard-Radcliffe bubble that she assumes all whites enjoy the same advantages as her - and not just in the United States, but across the Western world. It seems pretty obvious that Peggy McIntosh has confused class privilege with racial privilege. But others are laughably Peggy-specific, such as number eight: “If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.”Īnd some of them so clearly apply to members of her affluent peer group that they’re almost comically revealing - like number two: “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.” Number 15, for instance, is, “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group,” although that’s exactly what she’s doing in this article. True, some of these “privileges” can plausibly be ascribed to all white people. So what’s in the “invisible knapsack”? All told, Peggy finds 26 benefits she enjoys thanks to her ethnicity. Given the success of Indians across the Anglosphere, it would make more sense to talk about “brown privilege” No, it’s a bag full of useful things that all white people carry with them, regardless of how disadvantaged their upbringing. The “knapsack” she unpacks isn’t a $1,000 Burberry backpack of the kind Peggy and Kenneth might take on a hike in the Adirondacks. Rather, she is referring to the advantages she enjoys in virtue of being white and which, in her view, all white people share. According to William Ray, a Canadian journalist who wrote about her for the online magazine Quillette last year: “Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.”īut when McIntosh writes about her “privilege” she doesn’t mean in this conventional, upper-class sense. She grew up in an affluent suburb of New Jersey where the median income was four times the national average, and her father, who was a high-ranking scientist at Bell Laboratories, owned patents in several valuable electronic inventions.Īfter attending Radcliffe, UCL and Harvard, where she earned a PhD, Peggy married Dr Kenneth McIntosh, the son of a Columbia professor. Not only is McIntosh white, she is, by any measure, astonishingly privileged. “As a white person, I realised 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,” she wrote in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” With the American accent very firmly on “white” rather than “privilege” or any other aspect of class which British ears would so much more readily hear. Du Bois, but the phrase didn’t enter the lexicon until it was used in a 1989 paper by the feminist academic Peggy McIntosh. The concept of “white privilege” is some-times credited to the African-American writer W.E.B.
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