White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

“White privilege is like an invisible knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”

This sentence introduces the essay’s central metaphor, and it is the sentence for which the essay is most well-known. The curious thing about the knapsack, in her analysis, is that it is invisible to the people who wear it and take advantage of it, but it is highly visible to everyone else.

“As we in Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, ‘Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?’”

McIntosh intends to describe the social phenomenon of white privilege and to suggest ways to dismantle it and motivate people to do so. She draws on her women’s studies background as a lens through which to examine the issue, offering parts of a prescription as well as a diagnosis. Reframing an issue—or presenting an idea in a different way—can help encourage understanding. The metaphorical knapsack serves a similar purpose; it is another lens that McIntosh employs to help others recognize their invisible privilege more easily and clearly.

“For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy.”

McIntosh reveals a vulnerability in pursuing this experiment of looking at her privilege: if she acknowledges what she has gained from her white skin, she will no longer be able to believe that things are fair. Merit is not the deciding factor in social success and may not even be an important factor.

“I have listed conditions of daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these prerequisites as bad for the holder. I now think we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive.”

The range of advantages McIntosh discovers is striking to her. She no longer wants to put them into the one category of “things white people get that others don’t” because the privileges run from mundane to severe. Because she is white, she can both find a bandage in her skin tone and drive alone at night without fear of being lynched. Those two privileges do not belong in the same category.

“There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf.”

While the items in McIntosh’s “knapsack” are specific (e.g., they concern the color of bandages or the races represented in books), she here suggests that they fit into a larger picture. Growing up as a white person in the United States, she felt that the culture was “hers,” not in the sense that she owned it but that it belonged to people like her. A first-generation white immigrant was somehow more American than a Black person whose American ancestors date back to the 17th century.

“In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color.”

This passage shows how McIntosh discovers the possibility that, in many situations, her safety was dependent on a nonwhite person’s risk or sense of danger. Dismantling white privilege is not simply a matter of giving everyone privilege (e.g., bandages in every skin tone) because some white privileges depend on disadvantaging other races.

“I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what will we do to lessen them?”

In McIntosh’s previous research on male privilege, she wrote from the perspective of a disadvantaged group. When she turns to white privilege, however, she is in the privileged group. She wonders if progressive white women will be as unconcerned about white privilege as progressive white men are about male privilege. McIntosh leaves the question unanswered.

“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.”

Although McIntosh’s work focuses on male privilege and white privilege, this form of analysis can be extended more broadly. As people generally fail to appreciate the negative experiences that they don’t have (but other people do), privilege and the obliviousness that supports it permeate society. Undoing male privilege and white privilege can be seen as facets of the larger project of distributing unearned advantages more equitably.