On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning

Selected Essays 1981--2019

Peggy McIntosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351133777
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

From one of the world's leading voices on white privilege and anti-racism work comes this collection of essays on complexities of privilege and power. Each of the four parts illustrates Peggy McIntosh's practice of combining personal and systemic understandings to focus on power in unusual ways. Part I includes McIntosh's classic and influential essays on privilege, or systems of unearned advantage that correspond to systems of oppression. Part II helps readers to understand that feelings of fraudulence may be imposed by our hierarchical cultures rather than by any actual weakness or personal shortcomings. Part III presents McIntosh's Interactive Phase Theory, highlighting five different world views, or attitudes about power, that affect school curriculum, cultural values, and decisions on taking action. The book concludes with powerful insights from SEED, a peer-led teacher development project that enables individuals and institutions to work collectively toward equity and social justice. This book is the culmination of forty years of McIntosh's intellectual and organizational work.

PART I

The Privilege Papers

A LETTER ABOUT THE PRIVILEGE PAPERS

Dear Reader,

After I have spoken on Privilege, the question I get from the audience most often is, “What made you see white privilege?” On the chance that you are interested, I will go ahead and answer the question here. It is not a pleasant story, but it changed my life immensely for the better. What made it unpleasant? Being destabilized; having to throw away my main assumptions about myself and other people; having to change my sense of who, what, and where I am. In the end, those changes put my life on a different and better base.

Three years in a row (1982–1985), men and women had a kind of falling out in a seminar I was facilitating at my workplace, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. The seminar participants were college teachers from all over New England and also New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. We met once a month during an academic year. The men who joined these seminars were nice people and also brave, to come to a women’s college to discuss our feminist topic, new scholarship on women, and how it could be brought into all of the liberal arts disciplines, including math and science.

We started every September in great shape, with the twenty-two men and women appreciating each other and all appreciating the topic, which was endlessly interesting. Each year, some of us teachers described the ways in which we were already bringing materials on women into our college courses. But each year, some women would bring up the question of why we couldn’t put materials on women into the introductory courses.

In those days, I took a lot of notes. One man answered the question by saying, “When you are trying to lay the foundation stones for knowledge, you can’t put in soft stuff.” Like all of us, he had been reading many hardback books and refereed journal articles on women’s studies, but his comment showed he still felt anything on women was “soft.” He was a perfectly nice man. I wrote down his comment. None of us challenged his word “soft.”

In the seminar two years later, a professor said she didn’t want students to have to wait for a senior year feminist seminar to read materials on women. Another very nice man explained why materials on women couldn’t be brought into the courses of first-year students. He said, “In that first year, the students are trying to choose their major. That’s their discipline. If you want a student to think in a disciplined way, you can’t put in extras.” Reader, if you were born before the 1970s, you probably will not be surprised that none of the twenty-two university faculty in the group questioned his wording. This man, like every other person in the history of the world, was born of a woman, but somehow something had been done to his mind to make him think that the one who gave him birth and life was “extra.” I wondered what had been done to his mind to make our half of the world’s population vanish. I just wrote down his comment because I had no words to say.

But in those days, I did think I had to decide whether these were nice men or oppressive men. I knew they were nice men, and brave, to attend this five-hour feminist seminar, spending many hours each month traveling to and from it. I knew they were nice, but their comments made me feel oppressed. It had not yet occurred to me that people could be both nice (even brave) and oppressive at the same time. I spent a couple of years confused about this, but then suddenly I remembered back to 1979 when I read the Combahee River Collective Statement from 1977. In it, brilliant black women scholars and activists wrote, “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” They had gone on to say,

One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black women we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture.

They implied that not some white women, but white women as a whole group were oppressive to work with. I heard this sentiment echoed by black women at conferences and in the corridors of Boston area colleges. My first response, I remembered now, had been a kind of mental whine: “I don’t see how they can say that about us – I think we’re nice.” And my second internal and unspoken response was downright racist: “I especially think we are nice if we work with them.”

I realized then that I was expecting thanks for working with people I had been taught to look down on. Did that make me oppressive to work with? It took me about two years of dithering before I finally resigned myself to the answer. Yes, I am oppressive for black women to work with. I had hoped that I had disguised my racism by being nice – so nice. Now, I came to admit that of course my racism does show. It occurred to me the reason that black women worked with me was probably that at least I seemed to be trying. At University of Denver, I had taught black women’s literature, but had not taught about the ways white people’s systems created the hardships and conditions for the lives of the black characters and authors I focused on.

So in the mid-1980s, I suddenly realized this ugly parallel between the male seminar members’ oppressiveness and my own racial oppressiveness. This was a pit-of-the-stomach unpleasant shock. Then the history of thinking by the men in the seminars became clearer to me. I decided they were nice men and they had simply been very good students of what they had been taught. It was a litany of assumptions they (and I) absorbed from the curriculum and the society: Men have knowledge. Men make more knowledge. Men publish and profess knowledge, as professors. Men run the best-known research universities. Men run the biggest university presses. And we have internalized the idea that men are Knowers and that Knowledge itself is male.

Up until this point, I had thought that the reason I got grants for my work on curriculum change, when my colleagues of color couldn’t, was because I wrote better grant proposals than they did. Now suddenly I read it differently. I had to face my own litany of assumptions about whiteness: White people have knowledge. White people make more knowledge. White people publish and profess knowledge, as professors. White people run the best-known research universities. White people run the biggest university presses. I realized that I had internalized the idea that white people are Knowers and that Knowledge itself is white.

This was sickening. Then I came to understand what I believe to this day – niceness has nothing to do with it. I saw that the seminar itself was being funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and all the people I had dealt with at the Foundation were white. All the people I had spoken with at any foundation were white. I realized that not only did I have the whole Knowledge system on my side, I had the Grant-making system and the Money system on my side as well.

This blew away the myth of meritocracy for me. I had been brought up on the myth of meritocracy, which has two parts: First, the only unit of society is the individual. Second, whatever an individual ends up with at death must be what that individual wanted, worked for, earned, and deserved. Seeing my white privilege was wrecking my assumption that I had earned all that I had.

I did not want to face the looming questions, but I thought I had seen something very big about my life: that the Knowledge system and the Money system were working for me. So I asked what else I had that I hadn’t earned. My conscious mind refused to answer. I asked again, urgently: “By contrast with my black colleagues at Wellesley, what do I have that I didn’t earn, except the Knowledge system and the Money system working for me?” Once again, my conscious mind, the one with all the degrees and honors, wouldn’t answer. I was in the habit of asking questions of my mind and having it respond. This time, it balked. My mind said, “I won’t go there,” or “There is no there there.” But finally, one night as I fell asleep, feeling that I was in a spiritual crisis over this, I more or less shouted to the nameless powers-that-be, “On a day-to-day basis, by contrast with my black friends, if I have anything else I didn’t earn, SHOW ME.”

In the middle of that night, up swam an example. It woke me. I turned on the light and wrote it down. I was very disappointed. It seemed trivial. I think I was looking for the Next Big Thing, like the Money system or the Knowledge system. The message was this: “I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” In the morning, I looked at it and still found it trivial. Now, I think it is huge. It keeps me from having to be “the lonely” or “the only.” My feeling that it was trivial was a very white judgment. This statement became the first of forty-six examples that swam up over the next three months.

As I wrote in the first privilege paper that carries all of those forty-six examples, if I did not write them down immediately, they disappeared by morning. I did not want to know them. I was writing down things I did not want to recognize. It amuses me now that the examples swam up to me fully worded and grammatically correct. I am an English teacher from way back, which helps to explain that, but also shows me how close to the surface of my mind the examples were – how accessible to my subconscious. I suggest to you, dear reader, and to any student I talk with nowadays, that you ask your subconscious mind to answer your questions. I think that formal education suppresses most of what our subconscious minds have noticed. As children, we get a keen sense of unfairness, and how unfairness is obvious in lives and schools. But most schools do not teach us about racial power dynamics, nor do many parents easily discuss the terrible subject of racial power with their children, families, neighbors, local and state governments, and others in the world. I did not understand why black women found us white women oppressive until I dreamt on it after demanding truth. I found these wells of subconscious, suppressed information gave me dozens of grammatical, intelligible examples from my own life.

Each example was accompanied by a voice, neither male nor female, that worded the example so exactly that it did not need editing. In other words, this voice was instructing me about my experience. The voice was not inviting me to conjure up a fiction, but simply supplying words for what I already knew. The voice was answering my demand, “SHOW ME!”

After about three months, the examples stopped appearing. One night, I heard the same voice that had given me most of the examples say, “You need to write this down and publish it. It is probably the most important work you will do in your life.”

I wrote down my examples and my analysis of them and sent them to some friends and colleagues in Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Sociology, and Psychology in various parts of the country. They advised me to publish. But the Working Papers Committee of the Center for Research on Women, where I worked, refused to accept the paper for publication. The Committee said that it was “merely anecdotal,” had no footnotes, and was not really research.

I presented it anyway as a talk at many conferences and received requests to use it in courses in many fields. I charged $0.50 per copy that people made, but I thought that the Center could make money for us all if they published it and charged $6 a copy. So the next year, I went back to the Working Papers Committee and they turned it down again, emphasizing that our institution had a reputation for research to uphold and that a personal narrative could not be considered significant data. I understood their position, for I had received all of my degrees working with such academic assumptions; for example, I had carefully left the personal pronoun out of all of the papers I wrote in college and graduate school. I now believe that the omission of individual voices does immense damage to knowledge-making.

I was surprised when the same voice that gave me most of the examples woke me up about three months after the second rejection by the Working Papers Committee. The voice said, “Freud did not have footnotes!” I asked to attend another of the quarterly meetings of the committee and said that though I understood their dilemma, “Freud did not have footnotes! This is original work.” They looked at each other, my colleagues with Ph.D.s in the social sciences, and then said, “Okay.” As Working Paper #189,¹ it quickly became one of the Center’s best-selling papers and remains at the top of the list, along with Nan Stein’s important work on gender violence in schools and society. It added a necessary dimension to the all-white syllabi of feminist and male-centered courses.

Soon after the paper was published, I got a call from the Harvard Educational Review asking to reprint it. I said yes, on condition that the editors would solicit an article from a person of color, who does not have white privilege. They said they did not have space for another article. I offered to cut my paper in half and share the space. After a long pause, they said that the Review doesn’t publish “short articles,” so I turned down the invitation.

In 1989, Roberta Spivek, a skilled editor of Peace and Freedommagazine, published by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, asked whether she could condense the article. She reduced the list of examples from forty-six to twenty-six and brilliantly highlighted the salient points and images of my nineteen-page paper. She pulled my metaphor of the invisible knapsack out of the body of the essay and titled the three-page excerpt White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. ²

In the years since 1989, this work has turned out to be useful to a great many readers. I never expected it to make such an impression, especially because I felt a little bit crazy while writing from subconscious prompts. I think part of the secret of its effectiveness is that Roberta Spivek’s Knapsack version is so brief. Many assignments in school and graduate school are of lengthy articles and books, whereas my readers can pick up the kernel of this work very quickly. In retrospect, I think most readers are drawn in by the factual quality of the individual examples of privilege that I give to describe my own life. I do not speak for other white people, but I suggest readers look at their own circumstances of advantage and disadvantage in a very detailed, detached, and down-to-earth way. Many people have told me over the years that they remember exactly where they were sitting when they first read the Knapsack. Some say it is the only thing they remember from a course, or a major, or all their years in college! I do think the sky high costs of college are outrageous – but I feel this little paper is worth paying tuition for. I am grateful to all the brave teachers who have ever assigned it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• An Opening Letter
• Part I: The Privilege Papers
• Part II: The Fraudulence Papers
• Part III: The Phase Theory Papers
• Part IV: The SEED Project Papers
• Part V: Closing
• Further Reading
• Index