White Privilege and Male Privilege and Why We Should Condemn All Whites and Males

Cheyne Fujimoto
ASA 2

This excerpt was particularly annoying, crude, and biased, though this may have been the writer's intention. As one who thoroughly enjoys analyzing numbers and statistics, the broad, data-devoid claims made by McIntosh came across as being almost misguided and baseless. The irony of this is that McIntosh argues that biases create inequity for those not considered to be part of the "average" or "norm".  Her presumptuous ("I think many of us know how obnoxious this attitude can be in men.") and sardonic tone seem to come across as a description of how much she (clearly as representative of every single woman in academia) had suffered under the white and male dominant culture in the United States. However, the article reads more like a post on Buzzfeed with some accentuation from thesaurus.com due to its heavily biased and subjective perspectives. I wonder if the author of this excerpt would lash out at any male or European-American who is not self-deprecating. I am a male and certainly I take McIntosh's viewpoints with a grain of salt, but her points are muddled by using generalizations and assumptions to condemn two groups which have oppressed others, not due to the ideas and observations within them.

Surely it is clear that women in academia are at a disadvantage due to social constructs, though these constructs are slowly unraveling in part due to the activism and achievements of women in their respective fields. Individual effort is central to further deconstructing these biases and generalizations which limit a person's potential. For example, yesterday, I assisted with a club at a science demonstration in which students in middle school and high school in nearby communities visited UC Davis. Part of the demonstrations . I noticed that my male colleague had, out of around ten students and despite a very evenly distributed population, only picked one female to answer a question. Then I wondered if noticing that trend was being discriminate. My initial idea to balance out the statistics by choosing more female students seemed almost like affirmative action. Could it have been possible that I was committing the same fallacy as McIntosh for believing that this social construct is very real and puts budding female scholars at a disadvantage? No, but it certainly made me consider the duplicity that must be constantly avoided when considering matters of race or gender as a factor, but better systems should be in place to avoid subconscious discrimination.

Question: Are generalizations that help to empower the oppressed progressive or ignorant?

A video of part of the demonstration used to educate students of very distributed ethnic backgrounds and genders using a flamethrower and insulating ceramic fibrous material used to resist heat transfer around a convex disk (a plastic Captain American shield).