White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
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Peggy McIntosh, founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, which seeks Educational Equity & Diversity in the USA, writing way back in 1989 observed: “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. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable.”
Ella Alexander, writing in Bazar Magazine, January 7, 2021, writes: The horrifying murder of George Floyd back in May 2020, and the justifiable anger that ensued, made many of us reevaluate how we might inadvertently benefit from structural racism. It's an uncomfortable truth that white privilege means actively benefitting from the oppression of people of colour, whether being the dominant representation in the media or not being questioned about your citizenship.”
Speaking in a 20114 interview with The New Yorker, McIntosh, observed that “in order to understand the way privilege works, you have to be able to see patterns and systems in social life, but you also have to care about individual experiences. I think one’s own individual experience is sacred. Testifying to it is very important—but so is seeing that it is set within a framework outside of one’s personal experience that is much bigger, and has repetitive statistical patterns in it."
“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group. ”