Mixed Race Studies

The Origins of “Privilege”

The New Yorker
2014-05-13

Joshua Rothman, Archive Editor

The idea of “privilege”—that some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren’t discriminatory —has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the “psychological wage” that enabled poor whites to feel superior to poor blacks; during the civil-rights era, activists talked about “white-skin privilege.” But the concept really came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it. In 1988, McIntosh wrote a paper called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” which contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.” No. 24: “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race.”) Those examples have since been read by countless schoolkids and college students—including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman whose recent article, “Checking My Privilege,” has been widely debated.

McIntosh is now seventy-nine. She still works at Wellesley, where she is the founder and associate director of the SEED Project, which works with teachers and professors to make school curricula more “gender fair, multiculturally equitable, socioeconomically aware, and globally informed.” (SEED stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity.) In the next few months, she’ll give talks about privilege to groups at the American Society for Engineering Education, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, the Ontario Nurses Association, and NASA’s Goddard Space Center. McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, and went to a Quaker boarding school. She attended Radcliffe and got a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. (Her thesis was on Emily Dickinson.) With privilege so often in the news lately—there’s even a BuzzFeed quiz called “How Privileged Are You?”—I thought I’d ask McIntosh what she thinks about the current debates about privilege, and how they compare with the ones of past decades.

How did you come to write about privilege?

In those days, I worked at what was called the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. I was hired to conduct and administer a monthly seminar for college faculty members on new research on women, and how it might be brought into the academic disciplines. I led that seminar for seven years, and it was always expanding. Eventually, it expanded to twenty-two faculty from places like New York, New Jersey, and New England. We were asking, What are the framing dimensions of every discipline, and how could they be changed by the recognition that women are half the world’s population, and have had half the world’s lived experience?…

Read the entire interview here.

Technologies of Belonging: The Absent Presence of Race in Europe

Science Technology Human Values
Volume 39, Number 4 (July 2014)
pages 459-467
DOI: 10.1177/0162243914531149

Amade M’charek, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Katharina Schramm, Lecturer
Institute for Social Anthropology
Martin Luther Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

David Skinner, Research Convener; Reader in Sociology
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meeting the Needs of Ethnic Minority Children – Including Refugee, Black and Mixed Parentage Children: A Handbook for Professionals

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
2000
336 pages
234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85302-959-2

Edited by:

Kedar N. Dwivedi, MBBS, MD, DPM, FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist
Northampton Child and Family Consultation Service

Experts from a variety of disciplines contribute to this substantially revised edition of this popular handbook – new chapters are included on identity work, refugee children, and the work of the Asian Project. The book also examines the central importance for professionals of the Lawrence Enquiry; the move to include more public services in the Race Relations Act; increased awareness of institutional racism; and the specific inclusion of ethnic minority children in health improvement programmes. Offering practical guidance based on sound research and practice, the book provides a focus on some of the most difficult and topical aspects of this field of work.

Contents

• Preface, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• Foreword, Professor Richard Williams, University of Glamorgan
• 1. Introduction, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 2. Culture and Personality, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 3. Mental Health Needs of Ethnic Minority Children, Rajeev Banhatti, Northampton Child and Family Services, and Surya Bhate, The Tees and North East Yorkshire Trust
• 4. Family Therapy and Ethnic Minorities, Annie Lau, North East London Mental Health Trust
• 5. Children, Families and Therapists: Clinical considerations and ethnic minority cultures, Begum Maitra, Child and Family Consultation Centre, Hammersmith, and Ann Miller, Marlborough Family Service
• 6. Can talking about culture be therapeutic? Tasneen Fateh, Nurum Islam, Farra Khan, Cecilia Ko, Marigold Lee, Rubia Malik, Marlborough Family Service, and Inga-Britt Krause, Tavistock and Portman Mental Health Trust
• 7. What is a Positive Black Identity? Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 8. The Emergence of Ethnicity: A tale of three cultures, John Burnham, Birmingham Children’s Hospital (NHS) Trust, and Queenie Harris, Charles Burn Clinic, Birmingham
• 9. Anti-racist Strategies for Educational Performance: Facilitating successful learning for all children, Gerry German, Communities Empowerment Network
• 10. Mixed Race Children and Families, Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 11. Adoption of Children from Minority Groups, Professor Harry Zeitlin, North Essex Child and Family Consultation Service
• 12. Residential Care for Ethnic Minority Children, Harish Mehra, Birmingham Social Services
• 13. Practical Approaches to Work with Refugee Children, Jeremy Woodcock, University of Bristol
• 14. Community and Youth work with Asian Women and Girls, Radha Dwivedi, Northampton Child and Family Services
• 15. A Conceptual Framework of Identity Formation in a Society of Multiple Cultures: Applying theory to practice, James Rodriquez, Family Research Consortium, Ana Marie Cauce, Department of Psychology, Seattle, and Linda Wilson, Casey Family Programs, Seattle
• Bibliographic References
• Index

But your hair is so beautiful…

Black Women of Brazil
2014-05-08

Stephanie Paes (orginally published on 2013-06-12 as “Mas seu cabelo é tão bonito…” in Falando sem permissão)

I know that it is. And only I understand the time I needed to take account of this (1).

My hair is crespo (curly/kinky). It has gone through several phases (natural and later chemical changes), but it never stopped being crespo. When I was a kid it had little curls and was huge, until the sad night in which my mother, tired after a day of work and not managing to detangle my ends, silently took scissors and cut my curls without telling me. After that my hair started to change, I don’t know if it was because of cutting it or because hormonal influences, but it never ceased to be what it is: Crespo…

…What I hear now, with one or another variation is the following sentence: “Your hair is so beautiful! It’s a little cacheadinho (curly), not those ugly naps.”

What is the problem with this sentence?

1. Slandering a phenotypic characteristic of my race, you are slandering me. It doesn’t matter if you think that because my hair has a looser curl that it automatically ceases to be crespo. In fact, even if my hair was naturally straight, I don’t cease being black, and you would still be slandering me.
2. By exalting a feature that makes clear my miscegenation (racial mixture) and not allowing the black phenotype to be manifested completely, you are valuing my embranquecimento (white attributes). I’m not saying it’s bad to have a non-black feature, I’m saying that when you use it to say that my hair is better than another more genuinely kinky, you’re being racist…

Read the entire article here.