Tweet
I emailed this to myself and the source wasn't cited but i thought it an interesting read
-------------------------------------
1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race
most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to
mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. 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.
4. I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will
be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that
I will not be followed or harassed b y store detectives.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper
and see people of my race widely and positively represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization,"
I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials
that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this
piece on white privilege.
10. I can be fairly sure of having my voice heard in a group in which
I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another woman's
voice in a group in which she is the only member of her race.
12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my
race, represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that
fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find
someone who can deal with my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my
skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially
reliable.
14. I could arrange to protect our young children most of the time
from people who might not like them.
15. I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic
racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. 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.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to
my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer
letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad
morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my
race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a
credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of
color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my
culture any penalty for such oblivion.
2 3. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its
policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be reasonably sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in
charge," I will be facing a person of my race.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting
cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my
race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to
feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place,
outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
2 8. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another
race is more likely to jeopardize her chances for advancement than to
jeopardize mine.
29. I can be fairly sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person
of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to
cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a
racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either
position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and
minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but
in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from
negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives
and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor
will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self¬interested or
self¬seeking.
35. 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.
36. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each
negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to
talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or
professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be
accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on
my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of
my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have
chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will
not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to
experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my race
is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions that give
attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to
testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have
them more or less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I
wrote it down. 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.
These perceptions mean also that my moral condition is not what I had
been led to believe. The appearance of being a good citizen rather
than a troublemaker comes in large part from having all sorts of doors
open automatically because of my color.
A further paralysis of nerve comes from literary silence protecting
privilege. My clearest memories of finding such analysis are in
Lillian Smith's unparalleled Killers of the Dream and Margaret
Andersen's review of Karen and
Mamie Fields' Lemon Swamp. Smith, for example, wrote about walking
toward black children on the street and knowing they would step into
the gutter; Andersen contrasted the pleasure that she, as a white
child, took on summer driving trips to the south with Karen Fields'
memories of driving in a closed car stocked with all necessities lest,
in stopping, her black family should suffer "insult, or worse."
Adrienne Rich also recognizes and writes about daily experiences of
privilege, but in my observation, white women's writing in this area
is far more often on systemic racism than on our daily lives as light-
skinned women.2
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed
conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted, as
neutral, normal, and universally available to everybody, just as I
once thought of a male¬focused curriculum as the neutral or accurate
account that can speak for all. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more
finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these
varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society,
and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and
destructive. Before proposing some more finely tuned categorization, I
will make some observations about the general effects of these
conditions on my life and expectations.
In this potpourri of examples, some privileges make me feel at home in
the world. Others allow me to escape penalties or dangers that others
suffer. Through some, I escape fear, anxiety, insult, injury, or a
sense of not being welcome, not being real. Some keep me from having
to hide, to be in disguise, to feel sick or crazy, to negotiate each
transaction from the position of being an outsider or, within my
group, a person who is suspected of having too close links with a
dominant culture. Most keep me from having to be angry.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a
pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person.
There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I
was among those who could control the turf. I could measure up to the
cultural standards and take advantage of the many options I saw around
me to make what the culture would call a success of my life. My skin
color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I
could think of myself as "belonging" in major ways and of making
social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect,
or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms.
Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely. My
life was reflected back to me frequently enough so that I felt, with
regard to my race, if not to my sex, like one of the real people.
Whether through the curriculum or in the newspaper, the television,
the economic system, or the general look of people in the streets, I
received daily signals and indications that my people counted and that
others either didn't exist or must be trying, not very successfully,
to be like people of my race. I was given cultural permission not to
hear voices of people of other races or a tepid cultural tolerance for
hearing or acting on such voices. I was also raised not to suffer
seriously from anything that darker¬skinned people might say about my
group, "protected," though perhaps I should more accurately say
prohibited, through the habits of my economic class and social group,
from living in racially mixed groups or being reflective about
interactions between people of differing races.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident,
comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made
unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. 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. Its
connotations are too positive to fit the conditions and behaviors
which "privilege systems" produce. We usually think of privilege as
being a favored state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck.
School graduates are reminded they are privileged and urged to use
their (enviable) assets well. The word "privilege" carries the
connotation of being something everyone must want. Yet some of the
conditions I have described here work to systemically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance, gives
permission to control, because of one's race or sex. The kind of
privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best,
thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be
referred to as a desirable attribute. Such "privilege" may be widely
desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society.
Moreover, though "privilege" may confer power, it does not confer
moral strength. Those who do not depend on conferred dominance have
traits and qualities that may never develop in those who do. Just as
Women's Studies courses indicate that women survive their political
circumstances to lead lives that hold the human race together, so
"underprivileged" people of color who are the world's majority have
survived their oppression and lived survivors' lives from which the
white global minority can and must learn. In some groups, those
dominated have actually become strong through not having all of these
unearned advantages, and this gives them a great deal to teach the
others. Members of so¬called privileged groups can seem foolish,
ridiculous, infantile, or dangerous by contrast.
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned
power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look
like strength when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to
dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably
damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to
you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be
the norm in a just society and should be considered as the entitlement
of everyone. Others, like the privilege not to listen to less powerful
people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored
groups. Still others, like finding one's staple food everywhere, may
be a function of being a member of a numerical majority in the
population. Others have to do with not pervasive-negative stereotyping
and mythology.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages
that we can work to spread, to the point where they are not advantages
at all but simply part of the normal civic and social fabric, and
negative types of advantage that unless rejected will always reinforce
our present hierarchies. For example, the positive "privilege" of
belonging, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as
Native Americans say, fosters development and should not be seen as
privilege for a few. It is, let us say, an entitlement that none of us
should have to earn; ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At
present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for
them. The negative "privilege" that gave me cultural permission not to
take darker¬skinned Others seriously can be seen as arbitrarily
conferred dominance and should not be desirable for anyone. This paper
results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I
originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United
States consisted in unearned advantage and confirmed dominance, as
well as other kinds of special circumstance not universally taken for
granted.
In writing this paper I have also realized that white identity and
status (as well as class identity and status) give me considerable
power to choose whether to broach this subject and its trouble. I can
pretty well decide whether to disappear and avoid and not listen and
escape the dislike I may engender in other people through this essay,
or interrupt, answer, interpret, preach, correct, criticize, and
control to some extent what goes on in reaction to it. Being white, I
am given considerable power to escape many kinds of danger or penalty
as well as to choose which risks I want to take.
There is an analogy here, once again, with Women's Studies. Our male
colleagues do not have a great deal to lose in supporting Women's
Studies, but they do not have a great deal to lose if they oppose it
either. They simply have the power to decide whether to commit
themselves to more equitable distributions of power. They will
probably feel few penalties whatever choice they make; they do not
seem, in any obvious short¬term sense, the ones at risk, though they
and we are all at risk because of the behaviors that have been
Through Women's Studies work I have met very few men who are truly
distressed about systemic, unearned male and confirmed dominance. And
so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like
them, or 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. In any case, we need to do more work in
identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. We need more
down-to¬earth writing by people about these taboo subjects. We need
more understanding of the ways in which white "privilege" damages
white people, for these are not the same ways in which it damages the
victimized. Skewed white psyches are an inseparable part of the
picture, though I do not want to confuse the kinds of damage done to
the holders of special assets and to those who suffer the deficits.
Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think
that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color;
they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. Many men likewise
think that Women's Studies does not bear on their own existences
because they are not female; they do not see themselves as having
gendered identities. Insisting on the universal "effects" of
"privilege" systems, then, becomes one of our chief tasks, and being
more explicit about the particular effects in particular contexts is
another. Men need to join us in this work.
In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems
at work, we need to similarly examine the daily experience of having
age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage
related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Professor
Marnie Evans suggested to me that in many ways the list I made also
applies directly to heterosexual privilege. This is a still more taboo
subject than race privilege: the daily ways in which heterosexual
privilege makes some persons comfortable or powerful, providing
supports, assets, approvals, and rewards to those who live or expect
to live in heterosexual pairs. Unpacking that content is still more
difficult, owing to the deeper imbeddedness of heterosexual advantage
and dominance and stricter taboos surrounding these.
But to start such an analysis I would put this observation from my own
experience: The fact that I live under the same roof with a man
triggers all kinds of societal assumptions about my worth, politics,
life, and values and triggers a host of unearned advantages and
powers. After recasting many elements from the original list I would
add further observations like these:
1. My children do not have to answer questions about why I live with
my partner (my husband).
2. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of
our household.
3. Our children are given texts and classes that implicitly support
our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of
domestic partnership.
4. I can travel alone or with my husband without expecting
embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
5. Most people I meet will see my marital arrangements as an asset to
my life or as a favorable comment on my likability, my competence, or
my mental health.
6. I can talk about the social events of a weekend without fearing
most listeners, reactions.
7. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public
life, institutional and social.
8. In many contexts, I am seen as "all right" in daily work on women
because I do not live chiefly with women.
-------------------------------------
1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race
most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to
mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. 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.
4. I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will
be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that
I will not be followed or harassed b y store detectives.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper
and see people of my race widely and positively represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization,"
I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials
that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this
piece on white privilege.
10. I can be fairly sure of having my voice heard in a group in which
I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another woman's
voice in a group in which she is the only member of her race.
12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my
race, represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that
fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find
someone who can deal with my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my
skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially
reliable.
14. I could arrange to protect our young children most of the time
from people who might not like them.
15. I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic
racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. 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.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to
my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer
letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad
morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my
race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a
credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of
color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my
culture any penalty for such oblivion.
2 3. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its
policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be reasonably sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in
charge," I will be facing a person of my race.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting
cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my
race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to
feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place,
outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
2 8. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another
race is more likely to jeopardize her chances for advancement than to
jeopardize mine.
29. I can be fairly sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person
of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to
cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a
racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either
position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and
minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but
in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from
negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives
and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor
will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self¬interested or
self¬seeking.
35. 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.
36. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each
negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to
talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or
professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be
accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on
my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of
my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have
chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will
not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to
experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my race
is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions that give
attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to
testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have
them more or less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I
wrote it down. 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.
These perceptions mean also that my moral condition is not what I had
been led to believe. The appearance of being a good citizen rather
than a troublemaker comes in large part from having all sorts of doors
open automatically because of my color.
A further paralysis of nerve comes from literary silence protecting
privilege. My clearest memories of finding such analysis are in
Lillian Smith's unparalleled Killers of the Dream and Margaret
Andersen's review of Karen and
Mamie Fields' Lemon Swamp. Smith, for example, wrote about walking
toward black children on the street and knowing they would step into
the gutter; Andersen contrasted the pleasure that she, as a white
child, took on summer driving trips to the south with Karen Fields'
memories of driving in a closed car stocked with all necessities lest,
in stopping, her black family should suffer "insult, or worse."
Adrienne Rich also recognizes and writes about daily experiences of
privilege, but in my observation, white women's writing in this area
is far more often on systemic racism than on our daily lives as light-
skinned women.2
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed
conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted, as
neutral, normal, and universally available to everybody, just as I
once thought of a male¬focused curriculum as the neutral or accurate
account that can speak for all. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more
finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these
varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society,
and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and
destructive. Before proposing some more finely tuned categorization, I
will make some observations about the general effects of these
conditions on my life and expectations.
In this potpourri of examples, some privileges make me feel at home in
the world. Others allow me to escape penalties or dangers that others
suffer. Through some, I escape fear, anxiety, insult, injury, or a
sense of not being welcome, not being real. Some keep me from having
to hide, to be in disguise, to feel sick or crazy, to negotiate each
transaction from the position of being an outsider or, within my
group, a person who is suspected of having too close links with a
dominant culture. Most keep me from having to be angry.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a
pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person.
There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I
was among those who could control the turf. I could measure up to the
cultural standards and take advantage of the many options I saw around
me to make what the culture would call a success of my life. My skin
color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I
could think of myself as "belonging" in major ways and of making
social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect,
or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms.
Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely. My
life was reflected back to me frequently enough so that I felt, with
regard to my race, if not to my sex, like one of the real people.
Whether through the curriculum or in the newspaper, the television,
the economic system, or the general look of people in the streets, I
received daily signals and indications that my people counted and that
others either didn't exist or must be trying, not very successfully,
to be like people of my race. I was given cultural permission not to
hear voices of people of other races or a tepid cultural tolerance for
hearing or acting on such voices. I was also raised not to suffer
seriously from anything that darker¬skinned people might say about my
group, "protected," though perhaps I should more accurately say
prohibited, through the habits of my economic class and social group,
from living in racially mixed groups or being reflective about
interactions between people of differing races.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident,
comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made
unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. 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. Its
connotations are too positive to fit the conditions and behaviors
which "privilege systems" produce. We usually think of privilege as
being a favored state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck.
School graduates are reminded they are privileged and urged to use
their (enviable) assets well. The word "privilege" carries the
connotation of being something everyone must want. Yet some of the
conditions I have described here work to systemically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance, gives
permission to control, because of one's race or sex. The kind of
privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best,
thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be
referred to as a desirable attribute. Such "privilege" may be widely
desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society.
Moreover, though "privilege" may confer power, it does not confer
moral strength. Those who do not depend on conferred dominance have
traits and qualities that may never develop in those who do. Just as
Women's Studies courses indicate that women survive their political
circumstances to lead lives that hold the human race together, so
"underprivileged" people of color who are the world's majority have
survived their oppression and lived survivors' lives from which the
white global minority can and must learn. In some groups, those
dominated have actually become strong through not having all of these
unearned advantages, and this gives them a great deal to teach the
others. Members of so¬called privileged groups can seem foolish,
ridiculous, infantile, or dangerous by contrast.
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned
power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look
like strength when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to
dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably
damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to
you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be
the norm in a just society and should be considered as the entitlement
of everyone. Others, like the privilege not to listen to less powerful
people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored
groups. Still others, like finding one's staple food everywhere, may
be a function of being a member of a numerical majority in the
population. Others have to do with not pervasive-negative stereotyping
and mythology.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages
that we can work to spread, to the point where they are not advantages
at all but simply part of the normal civic and social fabric, and
negative types of advantage that unless rejected will always reinforce
our present hierarchies. For example, the positive "privilege" of
belonging, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as
Native Americans say, fosters development and should not be seen as
privilege for a few. It is, let us say, an entitlement that none of us
should have to earn; ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At
present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for
them. The negative "privilege" that gave me cultural permission not to
take darker¬skinned Others seriously can be seen as arbitrarily
conferred dominance and should not be desirable for anyone. This paper
results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I
originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United
States consisted in unearned advantage and confirmed dominance, as
well as other kinds of special circumstance not universally taken for
granted.
In writing this paper I have also realized that white identity and
status (as well as class identity and status) give me considerable
power to choose whether to broach this subject and its trouble. I can
pretty well decide whether to disappear and avoid and not listen and
escape the dislike I may engender in other people through this essay,
or interrupt, answer, interpret, preach, correct, criticize, and
control to some extent what goes on in reaction to it. Being white, I
am given considerable power to escape many kinds of danger or penalty
as well as to choose which risks I want to take.
There is an analogy here, once again, with Women's Studies. Our male
colleagues do not have a great deal to lose in supporting Women's
Studies, but they do not have a great deal to lose if they oppose it
either. They simply have the power to decide whether to commit
themselves to more equitable distributions of power. They will
probably feel few penalties whatever choice they make; they do not
seem, in any obvious short¬term sense, the ones at risk, though they
and we are all at risk because of the behaviors that have been
Through Women's Studies work I have met very few men who are truly
distressed about systemic, unearned male and confirmed dominance. And
so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like
them, or 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. In any case, we need to do more work in
identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. We need more
down-to¬earth writing by people about these taboo subjects. We need
more understanding of the ways in which white "privilege" damages
white people, for these are not the same ways in which it damages the
victimized. Skewed white psyches are an inseparable part of the
picture, though I do not want to confuse the kinds of damage done to
the holders of special assets and to those who suffer the deficits.
Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think
that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color;
they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. Many men likewise
think that Women's Studies does not bear on their own existences
because they are not female; they do not see themselves as having
gendered identities. Insisting on the universal "effects" of
"privilege" systems, then, becomes one of our chief tasks, and being
more explicit about the particular effects in particular contexts is
another. Men need to join us in this work.
In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems
at work, we need to similarly examine the daily experience of having
age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage
related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Professor
Marnie Evans suggested to me that in many ways the list I made also
applies directly to heterosexual privilege. This is a still more taboo
subject than race privilege: the daily ways in which heterosexual
privilege makes some persons comfortable or powerful, providing
supports, assets, approvals, and rewards to those who live or expect
to live in heterosexual pairs. Unpacking that content is still more
difficult, owing to the deeper imbeddedness of heterosexual advantage
and dominance and stricter taboos surrounding these.
But to start such an analysis I would put this observation from my own
experience: The fact that I live under the same roof with a man
triggers all kinds of societal assumptions about my worth, politics,
life, and values and triggers a host of unearned advantages and
powers. After recasting many elements from the original list I would
add further observations like these:
1. My children do not have to answer questions about why I live with
my partner (my husband).
2. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of
our household.
3. Our children are given texts and classes that implicitly support
our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of
domestic partnership.
4. I can travel alone or with my husband without expecting
embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
5. Most people I meet will see my marital arrangements as an asset to
my life or as a favorable comment on my likability, my competence, or
my mental health.
6. I can talk about the social events of a weekend without fearing
most listeners, reactions.
7. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public
life, institutional and social.
8. In many contexts, I am seen as "all right" in daily work on women
because I do not live chiefly with women.