I think it was
personally important for her to create an inventory of unearned privileges she
received as a white person because she wants to identify these things and work
on “working on” herself. Making this list helped her realize how privileged she
is and how much other aren’t. McIntosh expresses her concern for white privilege
by stating, “In proportion as my racial group was being made confident,
comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident,
uncomfortable, and alienated” (McIntosh 85). McIntosh also explains how men may
say they are for improving women’s rights but they will not admit to being over
privileged. She explains the phenomena of not acknowledging the advantages they
receive from the disadvantages of women. McIntosh later relates this back to
white privilege and expresses how the problem is denial or even obliviousness.
She explains how obliviousness is deeply rooted into the culture of the
citizens of the United States. We wish to be democratic and present equal
opportunity but with white privilege, this cannot happen. I think McIntosh
created her inventory of unearned privileges to in turn encourage others to do
the same. In her conclusion she states that it may take decades to for
systematic change to occur but it starts by raising ones daily consciousness as
she did.
I think it was personally important for her to create an inventory of unearned privileges she experiences as a white person because it allows Peggy McIntosh, the author, to understand that these “privileges” are simply unearned and are not truly privileges. She goes on to list the daily experiences she had which included turning on the television or opening the paper to see people of her same race widely represented (McIntosh). This experience should not be labeled as a privilege because it is something everyone should experience in a just society. “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of ones race or sex”(McIntosh). So it is important that McIntosh listed the “privileges” to come to the realization that these experiences shouldn't be labeled as a privilege, They should be differed by earned strength and unearned power (McIntosh). McIntosh believes that we can start by understanding which are positive advantages and which are negative, and then we can help oread the positive advantages and reject the negative.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I think that making the list of unearned privileges was important for McIntosh was because she was oblivious to them in the beginning. She states in the end of her article that it may take “many decades” for society because she realizes that many people have not pushed further into the topic than its face value (McIntosh). This infers that many people are still oblivious to side effects of their racial advantages. Though another perspective in which this could be seen is that maybe people do not wish to acknowledge the “privileges” (McIntosh). An example of this is in the beginning of her article where McIntosh states, “…I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged.” Again, we can replicate this thought process with the “white privilege” issue in that some people will not accept that they are overprivileged when they notice others, not in their racial group, are underprivileged. McIntosh believes that if people could just, in a sense, create their own list of privileges and identify the positive and negative effects of each, we can, as a collective, retain the positive and correct the negative.
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