Understanding Privilege

Cristina Musngi
Section 1
Week 4

In Peggy McIntosh's piece "White Privilege and Male Privilege," McIntosh, who is a white women, tries to fully comprehend male privilege by analyzing first her privilege as a white person. I think it is admirable for McIntosh to first analyze her privileges as a white person because it forces her to go through the uncomfortable phase of admitting that she has had certain privileges throughout her life. If forces her to come to terms with that fact that some of her achievements could have been partly because of her race.

While going through her self analysis, McIntosh makes an important observation that while the white males understand that women and minority races have disadvantages, they are reluctant to admit that there are certain advantages to being a white male because it forces them recognize that they success could be due to their race, just as McIntosh did.

McIntosh's experiment motivated me to view my own advantages as being part of the Asian-American "model minority" and struggles as an Asian American woman. It seems very conflicting that I have certain "privileges" being Asian but also disadvantages being an Asian-American woman. But this just shows how much we as minorities and women still need to fight for the future. The video below speaks to me when they said "creating your own group will not make us equal when we were never equal in the first place" with regards to white male students complaining about not having their own center. But it also brings me to question, how many of the white majority truly believe there is no such thing as "white privilege"? And for those that do realize there is a privilege, would they be willing change society when they are reaping so many rewards and advantages?