Indeed, since the tragic Charleston shooting last month-when a white gunman entered a church and massacred nine people during a prayer service-I’ve been gobsmacked by the frequency with which I’ve heard white Americans openly and candidly talk about the societal benefits they enjoy simply because they were born white. The schools don’t teach about the systems they teach about the individuals, as if they were the exclusive source of their own successes.”ĭespite writing about white privilege in this space last week, I return to the subject again because my interview with McIntosh reminded me that there is a larger conversation going on unabated across the United States about the effect of white privilege on all Americans. But they’re never taught about the systems that were in place to prop up those white men above all others. “Students are taught the myth of meritocracy. “Students are taught that all of American history was based on the individual actions of white men, with their belief in individual merit,” McIntosh said. She is the founder and senior associate of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, a program that helps teachers work with each other in order to find methods that bring gender and racial equality into their classrooms.ĭuring the interview, McIntosh told me that white privilege and male privilege corrode our nation’s educational system and discourage students from recognizing that myths are taught as facts. McIntosh, now 80, still works at Wellesley as part of the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.” I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.” I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” Later, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom trimmed the list to 26 examples and helped McIntosh condense the paper into her seminal 1989 work, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Examples from the original longer work include: And, she reasoned, if changing society’s male dominance in education was critical to liberating women, then destroying notions of white superiority in curricula was equally important in terms of freeing black Americans.Īcting as the scholar that she was trained to be-McIntosh majored in English at Radcliffe College and holds a doctorate in English from Harvard-she wrote about her epiphany in a 19-page paper titled “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” The paper outlines 46 examples of advantages McIntosh gained due to white privilege. Through a deeply personal and circuitous mental self-examination, she reasoned that if perfectly nice white men failed to recognize women in curricula-and were unaware of having done so-wouldn’t it follow that perfectly nice white people had also ignored African Americans and been unaware of what they were doing? As McIntosh explained to me during an interview, she realized that “niceness” had nothing to do with this implicit discrimination. The episode ends with a game called Good News, Bad News where they may or may not tease out a hypothetical scenario where Mona goes on a date with Donald Trump.Nearly three decades ago, Peggy McIntosh made a startling self-discovery about the many advantages she had unknowingly experienced and enjoyed as a white American.Īt the time, McIntosh was a women’s studies scholar at Wellesley College and was very concerned about the absence of women in high school and college curricula. Covering topics from thankfulness, entitlement, wealth and leisure, wonder and a theology of being, Jeff, Mona and Allen try to get to the bottom of this unsettling question. Is it moral to be grateful for privilege? This week the hosts try to answer what seems to be a paradox: gratitude and privilege.