The ugly legacy of slavery in our country is so pervasive, undergirding so many of our treasured institutions, that it would seem impossible to deny. My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of people who dismiss slavery as a contemporary issue, defend Aunt Jemima, and deny their own advantages. Perhaps the biggest domino of all has been the Mississippi state flag, whose Confederate design was erased by the governor's pen earlier this month. HBO Max has given “Gone with the Wind” an explanatory trailer. Advertising tokens such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben will be removed from food labels. Johnson & Johnson announced it would make Band-Aids in a variety of flesh tones. So it has been incredible in the past few weeks to watch the dominoes of McIntosh's essay begin to fall, one by one. Too often, privilege means that white people can ignore or dismiss cultural artifacts that play to stereotypes, glorify slavery or minimize the suffering of minority communities. Admitting to them is important, but that mea culpa does little more than assuage white guilt rather than leading to systemic change. The problem is that people who hold advantages are loath to give them up. McIntosh herself raised the difficulty when she wrote, “What will we do with such knowledge?”Īlas, the answer thus far in our culture has been to “acknowledge privilege.” And while that's not a bad thing to do, it's a baby first step in what needs to happen in the United States to achieve true equality for all. Not because her work hasn't made an impact - no, the term “white privilege” entered the lexicon largely because of this essay. Not because she isn't right - on the contrary, the metaphor of the invisible knapsack is a damning assessment. This is where McIntosh's argument becomes profound: In waking up the privileged to the experiences of their fellow human beings who aren't privileged.īut I do have one problem with this essay. Of being the only Black or Hispanic person in a social or work situation. Being eyed suspiciously by store clerks or mall security guards. They tell of being stopped by police, for the crime of driving through their own neighborhood. During class discussion, students of color immediately relate to her list. I frequently use McIntosh's essay when I teach my college students composition and rhetoric, because she uses example and anecdote to add both authority (ethos) and emotion (pathos) to her argument. These experiences range from walking through a department store without being tailed by security to buying flesh-colored bandages that actually match her skin tone. McIntosh bolstered her argument with a list of 50 advantages that white skin confers (26 in the abridged version, which would be widely anthologized). ![]() ![]() Like a child's backpack, this “invisible knapsack” accompanies white people at school, work and play, affording them “provisions,” “codebooks” and “blank checks” that give them a boost in life. McIntosh declared that whites exist in a culture of unearned assets that they neither recognize nor acknowledge. In 1989, the journal Peace and Freedom published “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” an essay by Wellesley College scholar and feminist Peggy McIntosh.
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