But they’re never taught about the systems that were in place to prop up those white men above all others. “Students are taught the myth of meritocracy. “Students are taught that all of American history was based on the individual actions of white men, with their belief in individual merit,” McIntosh said. She is the founder and senior associate of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, a program that helps teachers work with each other in order to find methods that bring gender and racial equality into their classrooms.ĭuring the interview, McIntosh told me that white privilege and male privilege corrode our nation’s educational system and discourage students from recognizing that myths are taught as facts. McIntosh, now 80, still works at Wellesley as part of the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project. 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. 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.
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