Examples Of White Privilege

Peggy McIntosh, in her paper “white privilege and male privilege”, describes how white people and males have developed the capacity to hide, not realize, or not demonstrate that they have privileges just due to their race or gender. She collects materials and prospectives from women’s studies, where it is often noticed men’s unwillingness to accept that they are over privileged, but are willing to accept that women are disadvantaged. This generates denials that protect male privilege from being recognized or ended.
This gender discrimination can be seen from the racial point of view as well, and it is that whites are not willing to recognize their white privilege. These two dimensions of privileges are related in the sense that both, males and whites are carefully thought to not recognize such privilege. The author describes white
privilege like having an invisible weightless knapsack full of special provisions, assurances, maps, clothes, blank checks and many others, that nonwhites don’t have.
The author reviews several types or layers of denial that she sees at work protecting, and preventing awareness about entrenched male privilege. Some claim that men must be central in the curriculum because they have done most of what is important or distinctive in life or in civilization. The author expresses many other ways in which she has perceived men not willing to accept they do have privileges, and that those privileges has prevented women to succeed at a faster and equal rate, or have promoted men’s success and recognition. In the other hand, the author explains that after faculty development work in women’s studies, she realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, and that most of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then, she realized how unconscious she was about the privileges she has for being white, and she found many ways in which she enjoys unearned skin privilege, verifying that such privileges put her ahead of many others of different race.
After her frustration with men who would not recognize male privilege, she decided to try to identify in herself, attitudes and behaviors of privilege for she being white. She lists 46 examples of such attitude and behaviors she identified in herself. The following are a few examples of them: “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time”, I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race”. When she reads all the examples, some privileges make her feel fine, but others allow her to escape penalties or dangers which others suffer.
She points that in proportion, as white group of people was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected her from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence. While writing the paper, the author also realized that white identity give her considerable power to choose whether to broach this subject and its trouble. During her journey of conducting women’s studies, she has met few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. In addition, she mentions that race and gender are not the only advantaging systems at work, and that daily experience of similar systems needs like age advantage, ethnic, advantage, physical ability, or advantages related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Finally, she mentions that as we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrary-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base. The article touch a thin fiber of the society that could be misunderstood by many, and moreover by nonwhite people. The author is brave, and reflects her bravery by describing how white people and males take advantage of an invisible capacity that other genders or races don’t have, and it is what she calls white/male privilege. Before reading this article I was not aware of the many types of men privileges that has existed for many years, and that still exist in this modern world. In the other hand, I did understand more about the types of privileges that white people have over color people. Why is that, that gender awareness is very low, and race is very high? That must be my perception, but for each different group of people or gender, there should be a different point of view. I understood the white privilege concept right away, however, the male one was not clear at the beginning, maybe because my denial was unconscious as the author later explains that concept in the paper.
Since I was a kid, my father thought me that women and men had different rolls in the society, starting from home, where the boys don’t have to go to the kitchen, while women are responsible for the food and the cooking. In the other hand, when my father had to discipline us, I used to receive a much harder spank than what my sisters used to receive when committing the same type of fault. Such concepts were normal for me for most of my life, but my generation had already changed the way this was seen, my generation was more balanced toward gender equality, reason why my character began to define my own way of observing and treating people. Finally I ended to be a balanced guy, who “respects” diversity. After reading this paper, that “respects”, has changed substantially, because I noticed that my male privilege awareness was too low, and that the white privilege was not a big issue for me, however, it was kind of unconscious as
well. The author tried to explain both, white and male privilege, by separate and in parallel at some point of the lecture, however, I think that at some point the description of the case and its details, were moving towards white privilege, rather than either staying balanced comparing both concepts at the time, or describe both concepts and write about them in an equal amount. That is not wrong, but it reflects the unconsciousness effect of the white privilege working on her for moments, resulting in a deeper explanation of that concept. The white privilege is hard to hide, and if you compare the discrimination effects of each concept, I think that white privilege effects are harder in most of the regions of the world. However, not in all the countries you see the same proportion of whites and nonwhites, but in most of the countries the population of women and men on average have the same proportion. One can say, as I just said, that white privilege has deeper effects in society, but for how long male privilege effects has impacted and continue to impact our society. Just a few decades ago, women became active at work and in many activities that were normally performed by men, and the results demonstrate that there are equal capacity to perform the same activities, even if women did not have the same opportunities as men, once they understand that they can make things happen, they perform the same activities even with a better performance than men. Where the balance still hard to equalize, is in the racial one, where despite white privilege awareness is higher than male privilege, the society still not move forward in that issue, and I think that the negative effects of the white privilege has hurt more people in the world, and I agree with the author, that to have a change in this dimension, it requires a lot of time. Once all humans accept that no one is more than other, and that all of us are equally humans, we will be living in a balanced and more equal world.