White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies (1988) 1

Abstract

In this chapter, McIntosh explains how she came to understand privilege systems via her work expanding college curriculum to include women. She reviews several layers of denial that protect and prevent awareness about male privilege and draws parallels, from her own experience, with the denials that protect white privilege. She includes a list of forty-six ordinary and daily examples of white privilege that her African American colleagues do not experience. This chapter also includes her parallels to and daily examples of heterosexual privilege. McIntosh distinguishes between conditions that systematically over-empower certain groups to dominate over other groups and conditions that should be the norm in a just society. McIntosh concludes the chapter noting that interlocking oppressions take both active and embedded forms – individual and systemic forms – and that acknowledging the unseen dimensions of oppression is necessary in order to redesign more equitable social systems. This paper is the essay on which McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” is based.