An interview with Peggy McIntosh

[Gormy Cuss]

She of the original white privilege and male privilege knapsack.

How did you come to write about privilege?

In those days, I worked at what was called the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. I was hired to conduct and administer a monthly seminar for college faculty members on new research on women, and how it might be brought into the academic disciplines. I led that seminar for seven years, and it was always expanding. Eventually, it expanded to twenty-two faculty from places like New York, New Jersey, and New England. We were asking, What are the framing dimensions of every discipline, and how could they be changed by the recognition that women are half the world’s population, and have had half the world’s lived experience?

I noticed that, three years in a row, men and women in the seminar who had been real colleagues and friends for the first several months had a kind of intellectual and emotional falling out. There was an uncomfortable feeling at the end of those three years. I decided to go back through all my notes, and I found that at a certain point the women would ask, “Couldn’t we get these materials on women into the freshman courses?” And, to a person, the men would say, “Well, we’re sorry, we love this seminar, but the fact is that the syllabus is full.” One year, a man said—I wrote it down—“When you are trying to lay the foundation blocks of knowledge, you can’t put in the soft stuff.”

The thing was, he was a very nice man. All the men who attended the seminars were very nice men—also quite brave men, because they’d catch flak on their campuses for going to a women’s college to do a feminist seminar. And I found myself going back and forth in my mind over the question, Are these nice men, or are they oppressive? I thought I had to choose. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could be both. And I was rescued from this dilemma by remembering that, about six years earlier, black women in the Boston area had written essays to the effect that white women were oppressive to work with. I remember back to what it had been like to read those essays. My first response was to say, “I don’t see how they can say that about us—I think we’re nice!” And my second response was deeply racist, but this is where I was in 1980. I thought, I especially think we’re nice if we work with them.

I came to this dawning realization: niceness has nothing to do with it. These are nice men. But they’re very good students of what they’ve been taught, which is that men make knowledge. And I realized this is why we were oppressive to work with—because, in parallel fashion, I had been taught that whites make knowledge....

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/the-woman-who-coined-the-term-white-privilege.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook

[Starry Messenger]

1. I absolutely love this article.

The points she makes about thinking of oneself as "nice" were spot on.

I remember when I first read Black feminists writing that working in movement politics with white women was painful, and I thought very defensively at first. I'm sure I went through an entire Bingo card of reactions.

But when you break it down and look at privilege, you can't see life the same way after. You have to keep up the work of examining how you are existing, and what oppressive systems you might be upholding.

[seaglass]

2. Thanks for posting this Gormy. I don't think I have ever read "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

before, though I have seen the list.

In 1989 she totally summed up what is experienced here on a centerish-left site, especially the bolded bit:

"Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to
think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [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 tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned
advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. "

[Gormy Cuss]

3. It's disheartening that people here turn a deaf ear to the many well written explanations

of what the concept of "privilege" means, and what it doesn't mean, which is guilt or personal responsibility for all the disadvantages suffered by those with out it. It's a tool for recognizing the less obvious ways in which disadvantaged persons are ground down, and with that recognition comes the ability to articulate and demand change.