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Rudy -Thanks much for the interesting article.  How are things with you?We
will be back in Ann Arbor for good on June 7th so I look forward to
checking in with you.



**************************************** *
*John Matlock, PhD*
Retired Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director
The University of Michigan
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734.355-1885| Fax: 734.769.8263

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On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Redmond, Rudy (WDA)
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/the-woman-who-coined-the-term-white-privilege.html
>
>
>
> May 13, 2014
>
> *The Origins of “Privilege”*
>
> Posted by *Joshua Rothman
> <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/joshua_rothman/search?contributorName=Joshua%20Rothman>*
>
>
>
>    - Email <http://www.newyorker.com/contact/emailFriend?referringPage=>
>    StumbleUpon<http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/the-woman-who-coined-the-term-white-privilege.html>[image:
>    Peggy-McIntosh-290_opt.jpg]
>
>  The idea of “privilege”—that some people benefit from unearned, and
> largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren’t
> discriminatory —has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties,
> W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the “psychological wage” that enabled poor
> whites to feel superior to poor blacks; during the civil-rights era,
> activists talked about “white-skin privilege.” But the concept really came
> into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies
> scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it. In 1988, McIntosh wrote a
> paper called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of
> Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” which
> contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: “I am never asked
> to speak for all the people of my racial group.” No. 24: “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.”) Those examples have since been read by countless
> schoolkids and college students—including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the
> Princeton freshman whose recent article, “Checking My Privilege<http://theprincetontory.com/main/checking-my-privilege-character-as-the-basis-of-privilege/>,”
> has been widely debated.
>
> McIntosh is now seventy-nine. She still works at Wellesley, where she is
> the founder and associate director of the SEED Project<http://www.nationalseedproject.org/index.php>,
> which works with teachers and professors to make school curricula more
> “gender fair, multiculturally equitable, socioeconomically aware, and
> globally informed.” (SEED stands for Seeking Educational Equity and
> Diversity.) In the next few months, she’ll give talks about privilege to
> groups at the American Society for Engineering Education, the House of
> Bishops of the Episcopal Church, the Ontario Nurses Association, and NASA’s
> Goddard Space Center. McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey,
> and went to a Quaker boarding school. She attended Radcliffe and got a
> Ph.D. in English from Harvard. (Her thesis was on Emily Dickinson.) With
> privilege so often in the news lately—there’s even a BuzzFeed quiz called “How
> Privileged Are You<http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you>?”—I
> thought I’d ask McIntosh what she thinks about the current debates about
> privilege, and how they compare with the ones of past decades.
>
> *How did you come to write about privilege? *
>
> In those days, I worked at what was called the Wellesley College Center
> for Research on Women. I was hired to conduct and administer a monthly
> seminar for college faculty members on new research on women, and how it
> might be brought into the academic disciplines. I led that seminar for
> seven years, and it was always expanding. Eventually, it expanded to
> twenty-two faculty from places like New York, New Jersey, and New England.
> We were asking, What are the framing dimensions of every discipline, and
> how could they be changed by the recognition that women are half the
> world’s population, and have had half the world’s lived experience?
>
> I noticed that, three years in a row, men and women in the seminar who had
> been real colleagues and friends for the first several months had a kind of
> intellectual and emotional falling out. There was an uncomfortable feeling
> at the end of those three years. I decided to go back through all my notes,
> and I found that at a certain point the women would ask, “Couldn’t we get
> these materials on women into the freshman courses?” And, to a person, the
> men would say, “Well, we’re sorry, we love this seminar, but the fact is
> that the syllabus is full.” One year, a man said—I wrote it down—“When you
> are trying to lay the foundation blocks of knowledge, you can’t put in the
> soft stuff.”
>
> The thing was, he was a very nice man. All the men who attended the
> seminars were very nice men—also quite brave men, because they’d catch flak
> on their campuses for going to a women’s college to do a feminist seminar.
> And I found myself going back and forth in my mind over the question, Are
> these nice men, or are they oppressive? I thought I had to choose. It
> hadn’t occurred to me that you could be both. And I was rescued from this
> dilemma by remembering that, about six years earlier, black women in the
> Boston area had written essays to the effect that white women were
> oppressive to work with. I remember back to what it had been like to read
> those essays. My first response was to say, “I don’t see how they can say
> that about us—I think we’re nice!” And my second response was deeply
> racist, but this is where I was in 1980. I thought, I especially think
> we’re nice if we work with *them*.
>
> I came to this dawning realization: niceness has nothing to do with it.
> These are nice men. But they’re very good students of what they’ve been
> taught, which is that men make knowledge. And I realized this is why *we*were oppressive to work with—because, in parallel fashion,
> *I* had been taught that whites make knowledge.
>
> *This is when you came up with the forty-six examples of white privilege?*
>
> I asked myself, On a daily basis, what do I have that I didn’t earn? It
> was like a prayer. The first one I thought of was: I can, if I wish,
> arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
>
> *Other people had been writing about privilege before you—why did your
> paper attract so much attention?*
>
> I think it was because nobody else was writing so personally, and giving
> such clear examples, drawn from personal experience, which allowed readers
> to understand this rather complicated subject without feeling *accused*.
>
> *How did people respond?*
>
> Well, at first, the most common responses were from white people. Their
> most common response was “I never thought about this before.” After a
> couple of years, that was accompanied by “You changed my life.” From people
> of color, from the beginning, it was “You showed me I’m not crazy.” And if
> they said more than that it was along the lines of “I knew there was
> something out there working against me.”
>
> *But there was a negative reaction to it, too.*
>
> The right wing wanted to paint it as craziness. But there were so many
> people saying it wasn’t crazy that I was able to put them aside. David
> Horowitz named me one of America’s ten wackiest feminists; that used to get
> to me. Now I think, If you’re going to do work for racial justice, you’re
> going to get attacked.
>
> *Have those reactions changed much? It’s been more than twenty-five years.*
>
> The truth is that it hasn’t changed much, except in the universities. The
> colleges and the universities are the places where you get a hearing.
> They’re where you learn to see both individually and systemically. In order
> to understand the way privilege works, you have to be able to see patterns
> and systems in social life, but you also have to care about individual
> experiences. I think one’s own individual experience is sacred. Testifying
> to it is very important—but so is seeing that it is set within a framework
> outside of one’s personal experience that is much bigger, and has
> repetitive statistical patterns in it.
>
> *Is that the challenge—or the usefulness—of the idea of privilege, as you
> see it? That it asks you to combine an individual view of life with an
> abstract one?*
>
> When Tal Fortgang was told, “Check your privilege”—which is a flip,
> get-with-it kind of statement—it infuriated him, because he didn’t want to
> see himself systemically. But what I believe is that everybody has a
> combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life.
> Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting
> with, for example, one’s place in the birth order, or your body type, or
> your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words,
> or your parents’ places of origin, or your parents’ relationship to
> education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or
> ethnic background. We’re all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of
> our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by
> minute, depending on where we are, who we’re seeing, or what we’re required
> to do.
>
> At SEED, thinking about privilege is deeply personal group work. We do an
> exercise where everybody reads out loud from something they’ve written
> based on Jamaica Kincaid’s story called “Girl<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/fiction-podcast-edwidge-danticat-reads-jamaica-kincaid.html>,”
> which ran in *The New Yorker* in the seventies. In “Girl,” Kincaid lists
> voices in her head from her early childhood, telling her how to be a girl.
> Everybody reads either their boy piece or their girl piece, and, listening,
> you get a systemic view of varieties of gender conditioning. One very sad
> thing—very major to me—is that almost all the men who are now over forty
> read, “Boys don’t cry,” or something like “Put the damn worm on the damn
> hook.” And that’s a lie—a huge social lie that makes men of that age have
> to act tougher than they feel. It’s a tragedy for the entire world, and
> it’s inflicted on boys; they’re not guilty of it. Usually the boy’s crying,
> or about to cry, when he’s told boys don’t. This is wreckage to the psyche.
>
> *You seem to relate to the idea of privilege in a very compassionate way.
> But isn’t that hard, since the effects of privilege are so unjust? Isn’t it
> natural for privilege to make people angry, rather than openhearted? I
> imagine Tal Fortgang in a college seminar, and the rancor that must
> accompany conversations about privilege in the classroom. How do you defeat
> that?*
>
> The key thing is to let people testify to their own experience. Then
> they’ll stop fighting with each other. One of my colleagues at SEED says,
> “Unless you let the students testify to what they know, which schools
> usually don’t let them do, they will continue to do just what the dominant
> society wants them to do, which is to tear each other apart.” The students
> who are sitting there fighting with one another aren’t allowed to have
> their lives become the source for their own growth and development.
> Adrienne Rich wrote, at the beginning of women’s studies, “Nobody told us
> we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.”
>
> *It seems as though, for you, talking about privilege shouldn’t lead to
> arguments; it should be a kind of therapy.*
>
> I wouldn’t say therapy, because psychology isn’t very good at taking in
> the sociological view. But it has to do with working on your inner history
> to understand that you were in systems, and that they are in you. It has to
> do with looking around yourself the way sociologists do and seeing the big
> patterns in the rest of society, while keeping a balance and really
> respecting your experience. Seeing the oppression of others is, of course,
> very important work. But so is seeing how the systems oppress oneself.
>
> *This interview has been edited and condensed.*
>
> *Photograph courtesy Peggy McIntosh.*
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Rudy Redmond
>
> Manager
>
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>
> Workforce Agency
>
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