![\"Peggy-McIntosh-290_opt.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/books\/Peggy-McIntosh-290_opt.jpg\")
<\/article>\nThe idea of \u201cprivilege\u201d\u2014that some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren\u2019t discriminatory \u2014has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties, W.\u00a0E.\u00a0B. Du Bois wrote about the \u201cpsychological wage\u201d that enabled poor whites to feel superior to poor blacks; during the civil-rights era, activists talked about \u201cwhite-skin privilege.\u201d But the concept really came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a women\u2019s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it. In 1988, McIntosh wrote a paper called \u201cWhite Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women\u2019s Studies,\u201d which contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: \u201cI am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.\u201d No. 24: \u201cI can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the \u2018person in charge,\u2019 I will be facing a person of my race.\u201d) Those examples have since been read by countless schoolkids and college students\u2014including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman whose recent article, \u201cChecking My Privilege<\/a>,\u201d has been widely debated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nMcIntosh is now seventy-nine. She still works at Wellesley, where she is the founder and associate director of the\u00a0SEED<\/small>\u00a0Project<\/a>, which works with teachers and professors to make school curricula more \u201cgender fair, multiculturally equitable, socioeconomically aware, and globally informed.\u201d (SEED<\/small>\u00a0stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity.) In the next few months, she\u2019ll give talks about privilege to groups at the American Society for Engineering Education, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, the Ontario Nurses Association, and\u00a0NASA<\/small>\u2019s Goddard Space Center. McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, and went to a Quaker boarding school. She attended Radcliffe and got a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. (Her thesis was on Emily Dickinson.) With privilege so often in the news lately\u2014there\u2019s even a BuzzFeed quiz called \u201cHow Privileged Are You<\/a>?\u201d\u2014I thought I\u2019d ask McIntosh what she thinks about the current debates about privilege, and how they compare with the ones of past decades.<\/p>\n
How did you come to write about privilege?<\/em><\/p>\n
In those days, I worked at what was called the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. I was hired to conduct and administer a monthly seminar for college faculty members on new research on women, and how it might be brought into the academic disciplines. I led that seminar for seven years, and it was always expanding. Eventually, it expanded to twenty-two faculty from places like New York, New Jersey, and New England. We were asking, What are the framing dimensions of every discipline, and how could they be changed by the recognition that women are half the world\u2019s population, and have had half the world\u2019s lived experience?<\/p>\n
I noticed that, three years in a row, men and women in the seminar who had been real colleagues and friends for the first several months had a kind of intellectual and emotional falling out. There was an uncomfortable feeling at the end of those three years. I decided to go back through all my notes, and I found that at a certain point the women would ask, \u201cCouldn\u2019t we get these materials on women into the freshman courses?\u201d And, to a person, the men would say, \u201cWell, we\u2019re sorry, we love this seminar, but the fact is that the syllabus is full.\u201d One year, a man said\u2014I wrote it down\u2014\u201cWhen you are trying to lay the foundation blocks of knowledge, you can\u2019t put in the soft stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
This is when you came up with the forty-six examples of white privilege?<\/em><\/p>\n
I asked myself, On a daily basis, what do I have that I didn\u2019t earn? It was like a prayer. The first one I thought of was: I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
How did people respond?<\/em><\/p>\n
Well, at first, the most common responses were from white people. Their most common response was \u201cI never thought about this before.\u201d After a couple of years, that was accompanied by \u201cYou changed my life.\u201d From people of color, from the beginning, it was \u201cYou showed me I\u2019m not crazy.\u201d And if they said more than that it was along the lines of \u201cI knew there was something out there working against me.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there was a negative reaction to it, too.<\/em><\/p>\n
The right wing wanted to paint it as craziness. But there were so many people saying it wasn\u2019t crazy that I was able to put them aside. David Horowitz named me one of America\u2019s ten wackiest feminists; that used to get to me. Now I think, If you\u2019re going to do work for racial justice, you\u2019re going to get attacked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You can read the entire interview here<\/a>\u00a0. Peggy McIntosh’s original 1988 paper on privilege can be read \u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and follow this link for the more popular excerpted version called ‘White privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack<\/a>‘
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