I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. I won’t pretend this will be a perfect list, merely an effort along the way.ġ. I think this is one of the real values of this exercise- seeing how this applies to your own life and context. I discovered in this process that my queer sexual identity undoes some point of white privilege, and doesn’t affect others at all. It is to everyone’s long term advantage to let go of white privilege. And that has been used as a wedge to drive people apart and even keep them poor and underprivileged since Nixon visited the South, and probably before. Being poor is terribly hard in this country and it feels as though you’re a fool for letting go of any scrap of advantage you can get. I think there’s an extra challenge in asking poor whites to lay down white privilege. Then I’m tagging five friends ( Ethan, Aaron, Danny, danah, Tim) to unpack their knapsacks as well. Based on Mcintosh’s original essay I will examine my own privileges, which ones have diminished, which remain, and which don’t really apply to me. Thus was the idea born for what I suspect will be the world’s least popular internet meme: unpacking my knapsack.
#UNPACK THE KNAPSACK UPDATE#
If I was going to take the message to heart I felt I needed to update and personalize it- try to examine my own white privilege in my own context. But it was about the privileges enjoyed by a white professor more than 20 years ago. I was first introduced to this essay in a session at BIL looking at how the election of Barack Obama had changed race relations and the lives of white people. In some cases that meant trying to extend them to all people, but many are based on a racial exclusivity and simply needed to go. First there was establishing that these advantages existed, then enumerating them- and then, taking what measure she could to lessen them.
#UNPACK THE KNAPSACK SKIN#
In Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf) she took on trying to understand the unearned advantages her skin color granted her. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”
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