Week 8 Discussion

For this week’s discussion, you are tasked with the following:

1. Read and annotate “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” then compose a reply to the reading of no less than 300 words that: introduces the title and author, summarizes the reading briefly, defines one of the arguments or persuasive points within the reading that the author is making, responds to that argument in relation to one of our class themes using specific evidence from the text (i.e. Do you agree or disagree; why? Is there something you would add; why? Is there something you object to; why? Is the argument derivative of a logical fallacy in the author’s work; how so?), and uses proper MLA in-text citations* for your quoted evidence. 

If you are unsure about your response to the reading, or if you are unsure where to start you response, you may consider any of the following questions to help you get started:

1. Do you agree with McIntosh’s definition of white privilege as “a package of unearned assets [white people] can count on cashing in each day” and “an invisible knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” and/or with some of the effects of white privilege as she enumerates them, from inside her own economic class, religion, ethnic status (separate from race) and geographic location (McIntosh 1 – 6); why or why not? Does the logic she cites point to the idea that contemporary Western and U.S. culture organized in a way that privileges some and not others, or some more than others; why or why not?

2. McIntosh writes that privilege, in some sense, ultimately means dominance, and that unearned privilege can therefore look like strength, when it really is permission to dominate, but that not all of the kinds of privilege she’s listed are inevitably damaging, and, in fact, some we would want for everyone in a just society, whereas others we would not want at all in a just society (McIntosh 8). What does McIntosh mean by this distinction, and can you explicate some examples of these different types of privileges as you see them, or as McIntosh has listed them? What does this say about power structures both in our current Western society and societies in general; how so? Are any of either kind of these privileges related to inequities in criminal, social or economic justice; how so?

3. McIntosh writes that it is hard to distinguish between privilege related to race, financial class, sex, gender, sexuality, age, ‘able-bodied-ness’ [my word not hers], etc., because they are all “interlocking oppressions” (Combahee River Collective as qtd in McIntosh 9). Are any of these types of privilege more or less apparent, or more or less ‘relevant’ than others; how so? Do the unearned advantages of high financial class exceed those of other groups, somehow, and does your answer inform a broader debate about wealth disparity and the results of exaggerated wealth disparity; how so? 

*(Remember, in-text citations are the “parenthetical” references in the text of a work that include either the author of a source and the page number you are citing, just the author for a non-paginated work, the title of a source and the page number you are citing for works with no authors, or just the title of a source for non-paginated works with no authors. In-text citations should appear at the end of the sentence, before the period, in which the quoted material is used).