White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

“White Privilege” is a personal essay. McIntosh uses the first person “I” and “me” as she describes her growing awareness of racial injustice. She uses her background in women and gender studies as a lens for thinking about race. In gender studies, “male privilege” refers to invisible advantages men have that women do not. They are invisible because they are so ingrained in social practices that people fail to see them or, if they do recognize them, they regard them as natural or necessary. McIntosh asks if there isn’t a similar privilege that she, as a white person, has been blind to. She says, “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but I had not been taught to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage” (Paragraph 2). She sets out to examine the ways being white eases her way in life but “about which [she] was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious” (Paragraph 3).

She argues that people in positions of advantage do not necessarily intend to deprive others, but the deprivation happens nonetheless. If it is unintended, where does it come from? She answers that those who are privileged have the benefits of systems that disadvantage others. McIntosh says she assumed “racism” meant using a slur or committing hate crimes. She did not see that racism is embedded in social, economic, and political systems that hinder some groups benefit others. She says, “I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth” (Paragraph 43).

In the key metaphor of the essay, she compares white privilege to “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” white people can use that are unavailable to nonwhite people (Paragraph 3). She argues that while the racism implied in this knapsack is less obvious than blatant discrimination, it is more difficult to combat because it is invisible and systematic.

McIntosh enumerates 26 objects in the knapsack—ways that whiteness eases her life. For example, she can criticize the government without being cast as a cultural outsider in her native country, and she can assume that the “person in charge” will look like her. After the list, McIntosh considers its implications. She says that if she faces up to the contents of her knapsack, she “must give up the myth of meritocracy” (Paragraph 34), or the idea that success depends on merit. She formerly believed, for example, that wages and job opportunities are matched to effort, knowledge, and excellence. Giving up this “myth” means rejecting the notion that society’s playing field is even.

Just as most men are oblivious to male privilege, McIntosh says she is now aware that she has been unaware of systems of white supremacy. One reason is that whiteness is not recognized as a racial category. Rather, it is the norm against which nonwhite people are compared. She sees this attitude reflected in her white students as well: “Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see ‘whiteness’ as a racial identity” (Paragraph 41). They have the privilege of considering whiteness a default setting. Finally, McIntosh cites the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 as an eloquent statement of the ways oppressive systems interlock with one another. To dismantle privilege, it is necessary to dismantle all systems that create and protect unearned advantages, whether they bear on sex, race, religion, or some other social category.