The Perplexing Paradox Of Privilege

In 1988, Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley College, wrote a paper called White Privilege and Male Privilege, in which she listed 46 advantages of being white. 

Almost all of them centred around the increasingly bizarre scenarios in which she imagined her skin colour helped her to avoid self-doubt:

21: "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group."

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."

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."

And my personal favourite:

17: "I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color."

And while this list raises many questions, perhaps the most pressing is; how does Peggy know any of this? 

If she asked black people to describe their experiences, isn’t she asking them to “speak for all the people of their racial group”? If she didn't ask black people about their experiences, don't her sweeping generalisations and patronising cliches carry "racial overtones"?

And given that I swear occasionally, am notoriously bad at replying to text messages, and shopped almost exclusively in secondhand clothing stores as a teenager, all without ever once worrying that these characteristics would be attributed to “the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race,” does this mean I have white privilege?

Hmm, maybe I've been white all along. Or maybe we need to think about this more carefully.

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Simply put, privilege is the freedom to ignore (or remain ignorant of) the experiences and challenges that others face.