#Invisible knapsack skin#
#Invisible knapsack code#

I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case, attach somewhat more to skin‑colour privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us”.

I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture.

#Invisible knapsack skin#

I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

I began to understand why we are mostly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of colour that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I do to lessen or to end it?Īfter I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious.

#Invisible knapsack code#

White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.ĭescribing white privilege makes one newly accountable. 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.

So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that 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. Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected.

These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. They may say that they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Through work to bring materials from women’s studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”