

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.

#Peggy mcintosh invisible knapsack citation full#
Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.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. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.

Our sample included all anonymous respondents (n = 49) working in a medical center. Methods: We conducted a qualitative descriptive analysis of 49 learners' responses to Peggy McIntosh's essay on "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" on-line. Abstract: Objectives: To examine responses to training designed to increase awareness of White privilege.
