Male privilege is something employed women are quite aware of: “It’s the exemption from discrimination on grounds of gender and an unearned advantage in the world of work and the domestic world as well,” said Peggy McIntosh, senior research scientist and associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women in Massachusetts.
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And most men, she says, are unaware they have this advantage–no matter how well-intentioned they are.
But there’s more: There’s another force at work and McIntosh, whose expertise is in multicultural women’s studies, calls it “white privilege”–which also includes white women.
“White privilege is an unearned advantage that white women and men have because of skin color,” said McIntosh, founder and co-director of SEED, a national project for the professional development of teachers that focuses on inclusive curriculum. “Like male privilege, it opens the doors for advancement by usually being given the benefit of the doubt.”
And like male privilege, many who enjoy white privilege “are aware of the injustice of discrimination, but don’t usually recognize the corresponding advantage to themselves.”
I often write about the benefits accruing to men in the workplace simply because they are male, like most of their bosses–and I often hear from minority women who say white women, too, have advantages they do not. Though McIntosh calls that edge “white privilege” and does not define it as “white female privilege,” she asserts that white women do benefit from their skin color–and that doors have opened for her because she is white.
In 1988, McIntosh published a groundbreaking paper titled, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” a personal account of the advantages she enjoyed compared to minorities. Her findings, she says, “haven’t changed much” in the intervening years.
“In the early 1980s, I first noticed male privilege,” McIntosh said. “Very nice men who were interested in scholarship on women said we couldn’t have women’s studies courses. Instead, our reading list was full of male authors. The message was that knowledge is male. Yet, at the same time, doors opened for me to obtain tenure, partly because I’m white and was seen to belong. Women of color have more difficulty being seen as belonging.”
McIntosh found 46 examples of the ways she benefited from being white, compared to her female African-American colleagues. Among them: The person she reports to at work most likely is someone of her race; she feels a sense of belonging at work, rather than feeling outnumbered or feared; and, she doesn’t have to ascertain every day whether problems she encounters at work have racial overtones.
What can white women, who don’t have much power, either, do about racism? “Use your white advantage,” urges McIntosh, who has worked to make more opportunities for minorities in her own department. “Support women of color in hiring, promotions and at staff meetings. Mentor, but not in a patronizing way. People of color have a lot to teach whites. Use your white privilege like a bank account: Draw on it to protest unfair advantages. It’s better for whites to take these hits–they can afford it.”
McIntosh is describing something that “women of color have been aware of for quite a long time,” according to Sandra Jackson, acting dean of the School of Education at DePaul University in Chicago. “Many white women, who sincerely believe that sisterhood is powerful and basically that we’re all sisters, are surprised when women of color say they feel marginalized and dismissed because the focus is on gender and not on the intersection with race.”
Jackson, who has a doctorate in educational policy planning and analysis, says the solution is not to feel guilty but to be “responsible for what your group has done. Once you’re aware of the inequities, you must speak up for their undoing. Men have to speak up, too. It’s a very courageous thing to do.”
And it’s also a privilege.