 Peggy McIntosh, a leading scholar on women's studies and issues of equality, added privilege to the discussion of gender, race, and sexuality.
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Dr. Peggy McIntosh visited Boston College on Tuesday for the event, "The 'Invisible Knapsack' of White Privilege: Continuing the Struggle." Speaking to a packed crowd in McGuinn 121 with students seated on the stairs and scattered on the floor, McIntosh - associate director of Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, founder and co-director of the national Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) project on Inclusive Curriculum, and author of White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondence Through Work in Women's Studies (1988) - elaborated on her work, concentrating on, but not limited to, white privilege, and engaged BC students in a discussion with their peers.
"White privilege," as discussed by McIntosh and defined by whiteprivilege.com, is "a right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of all others."
At the end of the lecture, which was sponsored by the Undergraduate Government of BC, AHANA Leadership Council, and FACES, McIntosh allowed for an exercise in testifying to one's own truth. Those in attendance were asked to turn to their neighbors and, for two minutes, speak on how an unearned advantage or unearned disadvantage has affected their lives. "It could have to do with birth order, the region you came from, your gender, sexual orientation, income, or body type," McIntosh said.
"Privilege does not mean wealth in this context," said Paul Marcus, philosophy professor and the executive director of Community Change, Inc., a Boston non-profit and anti-racist organization, in an e-mail.
"Here I think of privileges as things that come to me by nature of being a member of the dominant group," Marcus said. "We are very often unaware that we have these privileges and we take them for granted. In the case of race, there are barriers that people of color have to go through that are invisible to me as a white person. Peggy McIntosh's work has provided a window into this 'invisible knapsack' of privilege."
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