White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh 

This article talked a lot about how there's clearly more privilege that whites have over other races. This has been a problem for so long and it really doesn't, and won't go away because if you don't have white skin, you struggle with daily situations. Peggy McIntosh writes this strong piece about how much people with white skin do really have an advantage when it comes to what comes easier and harder to them. Even though it's disappointing and unfair, I always knew that whites have life easier but after reading this article, specifically the checklist, it made me actually realize that this is a bigger issue than I thought. 

" Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States 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 systems 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. " (McIntosh)I picked this quote because I think it showed that life just isn't fair. In our society, I think there are standards that everyone try to live up to but honestly,they're not realistic. As someone that's white, we don't notice how much we have advantage over other people. It's not even our fault, it's just how it is now. This quote points out that race and sex are not the only things that people use to their advantage. There's age, ethnic, physical ability, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. Overall, there is an easier way of living for some people while there are other people that deal with daily struggles because they're not white basically. For a white person, education, jobs, and careers as well as much more come easier to them and those are the things that people of different races struggle with their whole lives.

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." (McIntosh)Peggy McIntosh starts her article with this quote and I think she did this because she is right off the back telling everyone where she is coming from while writing this. A lot of people think of different races and automatically think of something bad. It stereotypes that are tagged along with certain races. There are people who right off the back, think for example, colored people commit the most crimes or overall are more violent. That's strictly due to people seeing racism as groups of people. This quote brings us the thought of how parents or teachers tell younger people whether it's their children or students what their race is. In a group of white people, more than likely you would talk about other races besides the race of being white. As a white person, I agree that we almost ignore the fact that we too are a race, and it's as if we have dominance over everyone else. It's what McIntosh refers to and the "invisible knapsack".

"In the end however, it is men and not women who make the most money, men and not women who dominate the government and the corporate boards; men and not women who dominate virtually all of the most powerful positions of society. And it is women and not men who suffer the most from intimate violence and rape; who are the most likely to be poor; who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy's stick." (Deutsch)I don't know if we could go on and comment regarding something said by another author but I scrolled down to read The Male Privilege Checklist by B. Deutsch and a lot of things that were said made a whole lot of sense to me. This relates back to what McIntosh is saying in ways because this checklist shows what kind of advantages that men have over women. I agree with every part of his checklist but I wasn't going to quote it all. I picked this quote to sum it all up because it really shows the advantage men have over women. This list could be some of the invisible privileges that men have. We all know the saying, " the man of the house", and "women belong in the kitchen", and even though these saying make people mad, there's a reason to why madness comes from them. Women really do get the end of the stick while men can basically do what they want because they are men. The have better jobs, earn more money at their jobs even if there's a women doing the exact same job. Our society is shaped to put men on a pedestal. I agree with this quote completely because it's true. Men get more credit for doing the things that women do and I think it has to do with advantages that men have over us. 

Connecting to Other Text: This can be related to the exercise we did in class that was developed by Lesley Grinner, "SCWAAMP". Mostly what the letter W stands for which is whiteness. Like we discovered in class, we value whiteness a lot more than we thought. In everything around us, we don't always realize it but there's something there that shows that we value whiteness too much. Also with the Maleness part of the exercise. We don't realize it always but being male comes with a lot more advantages than disadvantages. 

Questions/Comments/Points to Share: *How and can this issue ever go away? I have hope but then again I don't. I think men will always be put on a pedestal when being compared to women. For some reason people just think men are better at everything. Now a days things are just different because there's things that women can do just as well as men or even better. I think of body building when this topic comes up because now there's a lot more women trying to get fit and big and I think it could be because they're trying to prove a point. They can be just as strong and want to erase the thought that men are always stronger and women are weak. *I also aim this towards the issue of white people and dominance. The problem is that everything McIntosh said was true and because other races are put down, the race of being white isn't being put down therefore giving it dominance over other people. Will we always be in a "white man's world?"

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