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Peggy McIntosh

  • I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • ... as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and aliented. 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 to systematically overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • ... one question for me and others like me is 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()
  • 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.

    • Peggy McIntosh,
    • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988), in Bart Schneider, ed., Race: An Anthology in the First Person ()

Peggy McIntosh, U.S. feminist, anti-racism activist, educator

Full name: Margaret McIntosh.