![]() ![]() Several critics have also argued that the list somehow victimizes women. And it is women and not men who suffer the most from intimate violence and rape who are the most likely to be poor who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick. In the end, however, it is men and not women who make the most money men and not women who dominate the government and the corporate boards men and not women who dominate virtually all of the most powerful positions of society. In many cases – from a boy being bullied in school, to a soldier dying in war – the sexist society that maintains male privilege also does great harm to boys and men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. The existence of individual exceptions does not mean that general problems are not a concern. Obviously, there are individual exceptions to most problems discussed on the list. These are indeed bad things – but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes. More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too – being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. Very helpfully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted many times on internet discussion groups. I hope that writers from other cultures will create new lists, or modify this one, to reflect their own experiences. ![]() In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.ĭue to my own limitations, this list is unavoidably U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.Īs McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. Read more about K’s Praxis Center.In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “ White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Jaime Grant is contributing editor for Praxis Center’s “Gender and Sexualities” section, and recent Arcus Center executive director.įrom action research and radical scholarship, to engaged teaching and grassroots activism, to community and cultural organizing and revelatory art practice, Praxis Center makes visible the imperative social justice work being done today. Read the rest of Jaime Grant’s compelling essay “ Emptying the White Knapsack” on Praxis Center, an online resource center for scholars, activists, and artists hosted by Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. “I offer this piece as a follow-up to McIntosh.” Yet this article remains limited because it offers no direction for its readers after coming to this awareness. “For many white students, this article is an eye-opener because of its analysis that white people benefit from racist structures and the racist distribution of power and resources in US society every day of our lives. “Student organizing has been accompanied by seemingly endless discussions about white privilege and frequent references to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, a classic consciousness-raising piece about white privilege. At Kalamazoo College, a growing number of students of color are raising key questions about a college’s readiness for meaningful engagement with issues of racism, while students at the University of Michigan and the University of California Los Angeles are organizing against erasure in the wake of legal decisions against affirmative action. “Students of color at colleges across the country have been organizing for years to foreground their experiences of racism – raising a broad range of issues from campus life, to curriculum, to hiring practices and faculty representation of people of color.
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