{"id":36489,"date":"2014-05-22T01:19:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T01:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36489"},"modified":"2014-05-22T01:19:28","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T01:19:28","slug":"the-origins-of-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36489","title":{"rendered":"The Origins of \u201cPrivilege\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Origins of \u201cPrivilege\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2014-05-13<\/p>\n

Joshua Rothman<\/strong><\/a>, Archive Editor<\/p>\n

The idea of \u201cprivilege\u201d\u2014that some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren\u2019t discriminatory \u2014has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties, W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a> wrote about the \u201cpsychological wage\u201d that enabled poor whites to feel superior to poor blacks; during the civil-rights era, activists talked about \u201cwhite-skin privilege.\u201d But the concept really came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh<\/a>, a women\u2019s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it. In 1988, McIntosh wrote a paper called \u201cWhite Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women\u2019s Studies,\u201d which contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: \u201cI am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.\u201d No. 24: \u201cI can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the \u2018person in charge,\u2019 I will be facing a person of my race.\u201d) Those examples have since been read by countless schoolkids and college students\u2014including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman whose recent article, \u201cChecking My Privilege<\/a>,\u201d has been widely debated.<\/p>\n

McIntosh is now seventy-nine. She still works at Wellesley, where she is the founder and associate director of the SEED Project<\/a>, which works with teachers and professors to make school curricula more \u201cgender fair, multiculturally equitable, socioeconomically aware, and globally informed.\u201d (SEED stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity.) In the next few months, she\u2019ll 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\u2019s Goddard Space Center. McIntosh was born in Brooklyn<\/a>, grew up in New Jersey<\/a>, 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<\/a>.) With privilege so often in the news lately\u2014there\u2019s even a BuzzFeed quiz called \u201cHow Privileged Are You<\/a>?\u201d\u2014I thought I\u2019d ask McIntosh what she thinks about the current debates about privilege, and how they compare with the ones of past decades.<\/p>\n

How did you come to write about privilege?<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s population, and have had half the world\u2019s lived experience?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Origins of \u201cPrivilege\u201d The New Yorker 2014-05-13 Joshua Rothman, Archive Editor The idea of \u201cprivilege\u201d\u2014that some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren\u2019t discriminatory \u2014has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the \u201cpsychological wage\u201d that enabled poor whites to feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8,394,20],"tags":[1224,1162,3886],"class_list":["post-36489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-joshua-rothman","tag-peggy-mcintosh","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}