Owning unearned white privilege

National Catholic Reporter, May 26, 2006 by Heidi Schlumpf

You think you did it all yourself. You earned a scholarship to college, studied hard, paid your dues at your first job. Now you've got a decent midlevel management position, a spouse and a couple of kids, and a moderate but comfortable home.

But without your better-than-average public school education, that scholarship--and the college education--might have gone to someone else. And what about that interest-free loan from the First National Bank of Morn and Dad when you were struggling, not to mention the car they "sold" you for next to nothing? And did you factor in the real estate agent who steered you to that desirable neighborhood you now live in?

These are some of the benefits of white privilege--the unearned, unjustified advantages not automatically afforded to people of color in this country and generally taken for granted by those of us who are classified as "white." It is the reality that contrasts with the sincere fiction of the American myth of meritocracy, which says that everything we have must have been earned.

But white privilege is also about what we white people don't get: the multiple May-I-help-you's when we enter high-end shops, always being asked for ID when we use our credit cards, the hassle of being pulled over by police officers for "driving while black." It can be as simple as knowing that history books, greeting cards, even Band-Aids will include our skin color, or as complex as not having to worry that no matter what we do--positive or negative--it will not be a reflection of our entire race. No one ever says, "Isn't it great how that white person won the Pulitzer Prize this year" or "Look at that white mass murderer."

The invisible knapsack

White privilege is the "upside" of discrimination, according to Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College, who popularized the term with her 1988 groundbreaking paper that listed 46 advantages she realized she receives just for being born white. They range from "I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time" to "I can be sure my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race" to "I can be sure if I need medical or legal help, my race will not work against me."

McIntosh called white privilege the "invisible knapsack" because most whites are unaware of it and may even deny its existence. It's so much easier to define racism as individual acts of prejudice than to acknowledge the invisible systems that confer dominance on one group at the expense of another.

Getting white people to shift their thinking from "How terrible for people of color" to "How exempt and advantageous for us" was the goal of a recent conference at the University of Notre Dame. Sponsored by the university's theology department and cosponsored by more than a dozen other departments and organizations, "White Privilege: Implications for the Catholic University, the Church and Theology" was held March 26-28 at a university where, as the president pointed out in his welcome, blacks were not admitted until the 1950s.

In many ways it resembled a typical academic conference, with 100 or so attendees hearing provocative lectures from distinguished leaders in the field. But at times it resembled some new kind of 12-step program, with speakers' introductions quickly followed by their confessions of having benefited from the privilege of being white.

I came with my own preconceived notions. Since this was a conference on race, I expected to see the leading black Catholic theologians--Bryan Massingale, Shawn Copeland, Jamie Phelps. And they were there. But this was a conference primarily for and about white people, urging us to acknowledge our white privilege, to construct a white identity that doesn't include oppressing others, and to do something about the personal and institutional racism that still exists in our church and society.

That focus on whites was intentional. "I think it's important for white people to be put on the spot to account for our privilege," said conference organizer Margaret Pheil, assistant professor of theology at Notre Dame and a member of the South Bend, Ind., Catholic Worker community. "Our unearned privilege comes at another's disadvantage. It's not a flee pass. As uncomfortable as it is, we have to name it and recognize the ways we are exempt in order to disrupt white privilege."

It is not easy or comfortable for white people to think about race in terms of white privilege. Many of us who consider ourselves "liberal" in the best sense of the word understandably bristle at the notion that we are racist. Some of us insist that the real issue today is class, not race. Among the younger set, it's not uncommon to hear the assertion that racism was the issue for past generations but not for them. After all, we all know race is a social construct, not a biological reality, right? Isn't the world colorblind now?

Ah, wishful thinking. The reality is that in this era of so-called "colorblindness," racism still exists, more subtle, institutional and covert than before, according to sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Duke University. What we have, he said, is "racism without racists."