What is your favorite quote from the article? Why is it your favorite?

Your response should be at least 150 words for most questions and should be written as a discussion post.

This week, we focus on the McIntosh article about “White Privilege: Unpacking the Hidden Backpack” plus two videos from MTV Decoded.

The McIntosh article is posted as a pdf in this module. (attached as a pdf)

Watch the videos below a couple times each. You can click on CC to watch them with captions.

4 Black Lives Matter Myths Debunked | Decoded | MTV News

The Problem w/ White Beauty Standards | Decoded | MTV News

Then answer the following questions:

1. FOR THE MCINTOSH ARTICLE:

A. What is your favorite quote from the article? Why is it your favorite?

B. She lists 26 daily effects of white privilege in her life. Choose two of the privileges that you have witnessed a lot in your experiences in growing up, at school or college or in your neighborhood. Which two did you choose and why?

2. FOR THE BLACK LIVES MATTER VIDEO:

A. What are the four myths the video host hopes to disprove?

B. Did she do a good job? Explain.

C. Do you feel videos such as this one will make young people more aware of societal issues? Explain.

3. FOR THE SECOND VIDEO “THE PROBLEM WITH WHITE BEAUTY STANDARDS:”

A. What do they say the problems are?

B. What do they say about clothing billboards in China?

C. What did she say about how her family photo was filtered?

D. Why do they argue that more representation is needed?

E. Do you agree with them? Explain.

Requirements: for most questions, it should be 150 words each

THOMSON +- WADSWORTH Contents Acquisitions Editor: Bob Jucha Development Editoc Natalie Cornelison Assistant Editor: Stephanie Monwn Editorial Assistant: Melissa Walter Technology Project Manager: Dee Dee Zobian Marketing Manager: Matthew Wright Marketing Assistant: Michael Silverstein Advertising Project Manager: Linda Yip Project Manager, Editorial Production: Ritchie Durdin PrintIMedia Buyer: Karen Hunt Permissions Editor: Joohee Lee Production Service: G& S Typesetters, Inc. Text Designer: Cynthia Schultz Copy Editor: Kathleen Deselle Illustrator: Glenda Barlow Cover Designer: Gopa & TedZ, Inc. Cover Image: Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978), Amospbmc Effeco 11, 1971. Gift of Vincent Melzac. Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Re- source, NY. Cover Printer: The Lehigh Press, Inc. Compositor: G&S Typesetters, Inc. Group/Binghamton Preface About the Editors About the Contributors Wadsworth/Thomson ‘ 10 Davis Drive Belmont, CA 94002-3098 USA COPYRIGHT Q 2004 Wadworth, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Thomson LearningTM is a trademark used herein under License. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be repro- duced or used in any form or by any means- graphic, elecmnic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or infor- mation storage and retried systems-without the written ~ermission of the publisher. Introdzrction by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins Asia Thomson Learning 5 Shenton Way Wl-01 UIC Building Singapore 068808 Suggested Readings Inf Trac College Edition: Search Terms Info Trac College Edition: Bonus Reading Wadsworth Sociology Resource Center: Virtual Society Australia Nelson Thomson Learning 102 Dodds Sueet South Melbourne, Victoria 3205 Australa Printed in the United States of America 123456706050403 1 Shifting the Center For more information about our products, contact us at Thomson Learning Academic Resource Center 1-800-423-0563 Canada Nelson Thomson Learning 1120 Birchmount Road Toronto, Ontario MlK 5G4 Canada Introduction by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins For permission to use material from this text, contact us by: Phone: 1-800-730-2214 Fax 1-800-730-2215 SHIFTING THE CENTER Europe/Middlc EutIAfrica Thomson Learning High Holborn House 5015 1 Bedford Row London WClR 4LR United Kingdom 1 Missing People and Others: Joining Together to Expand the Circle Arturo Madrid Library of Congress Control Number: 2003 100217 Latin America Thomson Learning Seneca, 53 Colonia Polanco 11560 Mexico D.F. Mexico ISBN 0-534-60903-1 Instructor’s Edition: ISBN 0-534-62443-X 2 La Giiera Chmle Moraga 3 Report from the Bahamas Jtcne Jordan Spain Paraninfo Thomson Learning CaUe/Magallanes, 25 28015 Madrid, Spain

102 Race and Rack While in one sense we all have’power we have to look at the fact that, in our society, people are stratified into various classe.4 and some of these classes have more privilege than others. The owning class has enough power and privilege to not have to give a good whinney what the rest of the folks have on their minds. The power and privilege of the owning class provides the ability to pay off enough of the working class and offer that paid-off group, the middle class, just enough privilege to make it agreeable to do various and sundry op- pressive things to other working-class and outright disenfranchised folk, keep- ing the lid on explosive inequities, at least for a minute. If you’re at the bottom of this heap, and you believe the line that says you’re there because that’s all you’re worth, it is at least some small solace to believe that there are others more worthless than you, because of their gender, race, sexual preference . . . whatever. The specific form of power that runs the show here is the power to intimidate. The power to take away the most lives the quickest, and back it up with legal and “divine” sanction, is the very bottom line. It makes the differ- ence between who’s holding the racism end of the stick and who’s getting beat with it (or beating others as vulnerable as they are) on the internalized racism end of the stick. What I am saying is, while people of color are welcome to tear up their own neighborhoods and each other, everybody knows that you can- not do that to white folks without hell to pay. People of color can be prejudiced against one another and whites, but do not have an ice-cube’s chance in hell of passing laws that will get whites sent to relocation camps “for their own pro- tection and the security of the nation.” People who have not thought about or refuse to acknowledge this imbalance of power/privilege often want to talk about the racism of people of color. But then that is one of the ways racism is able to continue to function. You look for someone to blame and you blame the victim, who will nine times out of ten accept the blame out of habit. So, what can we do? Acknowledge racism for a start, even though and es- pecially when we’ve struggled to be kind and fair, or struggled to rise above it all. It is hard to acknowledge the fact that racism circumscribes and pervades our lives. Racism must be dealt with on two levels, personal and societal, emo- tional and institutional. It is possible-and most effective-to do both at the same time. We must reclaim whatever delight we have lost in our own ethnic heritage or heritages. This so-called melting pot has only succeeded in turn- ing us into fast-food gobbling “generics” (as in generic “white folks” who were once Irish, Polish, Russian, English, etc. and “black folks,” who were once Ashanti, Bambara, Bade, Yoruba, etc.). Find or create safe places to actually feel what we’ve been forced to repress each time we were a victim of, witness to or perpetrator of racism, so that we do not continue, like puppets, to act out the past in the present and future. Challenge oppression. Take a stand against it. When you are aware of something oppressive going down, stop the show. At least call it. We become so numbed to racism that we don’t even think twice about it, unless it is immediately life-threatening. Peggy McIntosh 103 Whites who want to be allies to people of color: You can educate yourselves via research and observation rather than rigidly, arrogantly relying solely on in- terrogating people of color. Do not expect that people of color should teach YOU how to behave non-oppressively. Do not give into the pull to be lav. Think, hard. Do not blame people of color for your frustration about racism, but do appreciate the fact that color will often help you get in touch with that frustration. Assume effort to be a good friend is appreci- ated, but don’t expect or from people of color. Work on rac- ism for your sake, not that you are needed and capable of being a good ally. and commit yourself to correcting them and what. Don’t give up. always that you and others Like you are completely worthy of respect, completely capable of achieving whatever you take a notion to do. Remember that the term “people of color” refers to a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. These various groups have been oppressed in a variety of ways. Educate yourself about the ways different peoples have been oppressed and how they’ve resis- ted that oppression. Expect and insist that whites are capable of being good al- lies against racism. Don’t give up. Resist the pull to give out the “people of color seal of approval” to aspiring white allies. A moment of appreciation is fine, but more than that tends to be less than helpful. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate the inevitable end of racism. WHITE PRIVILEGE Unpacking the InvisibIe Knapsack Peggy McZntosh Through work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are Copyright O 1988 by Peggy McIntosh. Permission to duplicate must be obtained from the au- thor. Excerpting is not authorized. A longer analysis and list of privileges, including heterose-1 ~rivilege, is available from Peggy McIntosh, Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, MA, 02481-8203. Tel. (617) 283-2520; Fax (617) 283-2504.

104 Race and Rack overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of less- ening men’s. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advan- tages which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended. Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and pro- tected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as some- thing which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untu- tored way to askwhat it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cash- ing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special passports, codebooks visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask of their power, so one who writes about having “Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?” After I realized the extent to which men work edged privilege, I understood that much of their scious. Then I remembered the frequent charges have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence. white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I begm to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has po~nted out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow “them” to be more like “us.” I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifymg some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, reli- gion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American Peggy McIntosh 1 US co-workers, friends and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or fre- quent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions. 1. I can if I wish arrange to be inlthe company of people of my race most of the time. 2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me. 4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. 5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. 6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. 7. 1 can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that tes- tify to the existence of their race. 8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for chis piece on white privilege. 9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race rep- resented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser5 shop and find someone who can cut my hair. 10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliabiliw. .- – 1 I. 1 can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them. 12. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, with- out having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. 13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial. 14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. 15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. 16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion. 17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider. 18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.

106 Rare and Racb 19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race. 20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race. 21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, un- heard, held at a distance, or feared. 22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co- workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race. 23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen. 24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me. 25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative epi- sode or situation whether it has racial overtones. 26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be-an elusive and fugitive sub- ject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I & of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain virtues of their own. Ln unpacking this invisible knapsack of white ditions of daily experience which I once took for any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive. what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin cohr was an assetfir any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of mak- ing social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely. In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made inconfident, uncornfort- able, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, dis- tress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color. For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. 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 sys- tematically overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dom- inance because of one’s race or sex. I want, then, to distinguish Metween earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the priv- ileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ig- nore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups. We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feel- ing that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At pres- ent, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power which I orig- inally saw as attendant on being a human being in the U.S. consisted in un- earned advantage and conferred dominance. I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, un- earned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dom- inance and if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifymg how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, per- haps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging sys- tems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantag- ing associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently. One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a

member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because 1 was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible sys- tems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth. , Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their atti- tudes. put] a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot To redesign social systems we seen dimensions. The silences political tool here. They keep the thinking plete, protecting unearned advantage and while denying that systems of dominance exist. these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites now to be about equal opportunity to It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like oblivious- ness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing ques- tions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily con- sciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage. and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to .- – – u, try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base. OF RACE AND RISK Patricia 3. William Several years ago, at a moment when I was tired of the unstable lifestyle that academic careers sometimes require, I surprised myself and From The Nation, December 29, 1997. Reprinted with permission. Patrr’cia3. Williams 109 bought a real house. Because the house was in a state other than the one where I was living at the time, I obtained my mortgage by telephone. I am a prudent little squirrel when it comes to things financial, always tucking away stores of nuts for the winter, and so I meet the criteria of a quite good credit risk. My loan was approved almost immedjately. A little while later, the contract came in the mail. Among the papers the bank forwarded were forms documenting compliance with the Fair Housing Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in the housing market. The act monitors lending practices to prevent banks from redlining-redlining being the phenomenon whereby banks circle certain neighborhoods on the map and refuse to lend in those areas. It is a practice for which the bank with which I was dealing, unbeknownst to me, had been cited previously-as well as since. In any event, the act tracks the race of all banking customers to prevent discrimination. Unfortunately, and with the creative variability of all illegality, some banks also use the racial information disclosed on the fair housing forms to engage in precisely the discrimination the law seeks to prevent. I should repeat that to this point my entire mortgage transaction had been conducted by telephone. I should also note that I speak a Received Standard English, regionally marked as Northeastern perhaps, but not easily identifi- able as black. With my credit history, my job as a law professor and, no doubt, with my accent, I am not only middle class but apparently match the cultural stereotype of a good white person. It is thus, perhaps, that the loan officer of the bank, whom I had never met, had checked off the box on the fair housing form indicating that I was white. Race shouldn’t matter, I suppose, but it seemed to in this case, so I took a deep breath, crossed out “white” and sent the contract back. That will teach them to presume too much, I thought. A done deal, I assumed. But suddenly the transaction came to a screeching halt. The bank wanted more money, more points, a higher rate of interest. Suddenly I found myself facing great re- sistance and much more debt. To make a long story short, I threatened to sue under the act in question, the bank quickly backed down and I procured the loan on the original terms. What was interesting about all this was that the reason the bank gave for its new-found recalcitrance was not race, heaven forbid. No, it was all about economics and increased risk: The reason they gave was that property values in that neighborhood were suddenly falling. They wanted more money to buffer themselves against the snappy winds of projected misfortune. Initially, 1 was surprised, confused. The house was in a neighborhood that was extremely stable. I am an extremely careful shopper; I had uncovered ab- solutely nothing to indicate that prices were falling. It took my realtor to make me see the light. “Don’t you get it,” he sighed. “This is what always happens.”

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