Understanding Privilege Exercise

*Adapted from White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh*

Coarse outline: In His Image Outline

Read each statement. Note which statements are true for you and which are not. These statements reflect everyday instances of racial privilege and disadvantage.

  1. 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.
  2. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
  3. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
  4. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
  5. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
  6. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
  7. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
  8. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.
  9. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
  10. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
  11. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
  12. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
  13. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

 

Passage by Peggy McIntosh

I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that 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. 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.