White Privilege Essay
Education 305
White Privilege
This week’s reading by Peggy McIntosh’s, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack really resonated with me. It forced me to think about how being white grants a person a set of positive privileges that others don’t have. Because of this, I felt compelled to write a response. I will start with her argument, make a comparison to another reading, provide the context for her article, and lastly issue some of my own opinions on the topic.
Argument McIntosh’s argument is based on the idea of how a white person is taught that racism is something that puts others at a disadvantage, but never seeing it in the perspective of how being white puts a person at an advantage. She discusses how it is like having “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day “. She compares the situation to how males don’t recognize their male privileges. They are oppressing people in ways that are unconscious to them. To demonstrate her ideas, she creates a list with twenty six items, which showcase white privilege.
Comparison
In McIntosh’s article, she talks about how white people unconsciously oppress others of different races. They have a set of privileges and conditions that set them apart from others in a beneficial way, which “confers dominance”. This is something that happens subconsciously once they are born, a result of society’s hidden bias towards the white race. This made me think about David Sadker and Karen Zittleman’s Gender Bias: From Colonial America to Today’s Classroom article. In their article, they discuss how historically, boys and girls are taught to have certain characteristics that are typical of their sex. An example they used was how girls were taught certain things such as sewing back in the 1800s to prepare them for a life as a at home wife. This is interesting, because they are subconsciously perpetuating gender stereotypes based on what sex you are at birth, just like how
White Privilege
This week’s reading by Peggy McIntosh’s, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack really resonated with me. It forced me to think about how being white grants a person a set of positive privileges that others don’t have. Because of this, I felt compelled to write a response. I will start with her argument, make a comparison to another reading, provide the context for her article, and lastly issue some of my own opinions on the topic.
Argument McIntosh’s argument is based on the idea of how a white person is taught that racism is something that puts others at a disadvantage, but never seeing it in the perspective of how being white puts a person at an advantage. She discusses how it is like having “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day “. She compares the situation to how males don’t recognize their male privileges. They are oppressing people in ways that are unconscious to them. To demonstrate her ideas, she creates a list with twenty six items, which showcase white privilege.
Comparison
In McIntosh’s article, she talks about how white people unconsciously oppress others of different races. They have a set of privileges and conditions that set them apart from others in a beneficial way, which “confers dominance”. This is something that happens subconsciously once they are born, a result of society’s hidden bias towards the white race. This made me think about David Sadker and Karen Zittleman’s Gender Bias: From Colonial America to Today’s Classroom article. In their article, they discuss how historically, boys and girls are taught to have certain characteristics that are typical of their sex. An example they used was how girls were taught certain things such as sewing back in the 1800s to prepare them for a life as a at home wife. This is interesting, because they are subconsciously perpetuating gender stereotypes based on what sex you are at birth, just like how