White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
by Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there is most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. 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?"

http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html

Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race
By Sam Adler-Bell. This article originally appeared on Alternet. _____

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything (he’d) accomplished, all the hard work (he’d) done.”

His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.

What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him — if not his ancestors — some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege.

To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay — indignant, defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing — followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops. She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” -

See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/white-people-freak-theyre-called-race-hesaid/#sthash.FcW91BzV.dpuf

White America’s racial illiteracy: Why our national conversation is poisoned from the start
The author of "What Does It Mean to Be White?" examines the ways white people implode when they talk about race
DR. ROBIN DIANGELO, THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources—schools, textbooks, media—don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.

Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate. When you add a lack of humility to that illiteracy (because we don’t know what we don’t know), you get the break-down we so often see when trying to engage white people in meaningful conversations about race.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to individual racial prejudice and the intentional actions that result. The people that commit these intentional acts are deemed bad, and those that don’t are good. If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

Social scientists understand racism as a multidimensional and highly adaptive system—a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources between racial groups. Because whites built and dominate all significant institutions, (often at the expense of and on the uncompensated labor of other groups), their interests are embedded in the foundation of U.S. society.

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/10/white_americas_racial_illiteracy_why_our_national_conversation_is_poisoned_from_the_start_partner/

Daily Beast editor Goldie Taylor and her son Josh -- Twitter

(EDITORS NOTE: In an email sent to Raw Story, Goldie Taylor clarified that the “weapon” held to her son’s back was a Taser and not a gun. We apologize for the confusion.)

Daily Beast editor Goldie Taylor took to Twitter on Saturday to relate the story of her son who was held at gunpoint by undercover police with a Taser when he innocently tried to sell his MacBook via Craigslist.

According to Taylor, her son Josh contacted her on Friday after the prospective “buyer” of the laptop approached him on the street only to have another undercover officer slip up behind him and press a weapon to his back before handcuffing him.

Taylor relates that her son — a young black man — told her, “Mom, if I had moved they could’ve killed me and gotten away with it.”

Over a series of tweets, Taylor explained that her son had agreed to meet with an actual buyer — who later emailed to apologize and blamed the police — when he was cuffed while officers scanned his laptop to see if it was stolen.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/daily-beast-editor-documents-chilling-story-of-son-held-at-gunpoint-by-cops-for-selling-his-laptop/#.VzkEPfs-FV4.twitter

In 1919, after the end of World War I, Black sharecroppers in Arkansas began to unionize. This attempt to form unions, triggered white vigilantism and mass killings, that left 237 Blacks dead.

Towards the end of 1918, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton of Little Rock, Arkansas listened to Black sharecroppers tell stories of theft, exploitation, and never ending debt. One man by the name of Carter, explained how he cultivated 90 acres of cotton and then had his landlord confiscate the crop and all of his possessions. Another Black farmer, from Ratio, Arkansas said a plantation manager would not give sharecroppers an itemized record of their crop. No one realized that within a year of meeting with Mr. Bratton, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. would take place. In a report released by the Equal Justice Initiative, white people in the Delta region of the South, started a massacre that left 237 Black people dead. Even though the one-time death toll was unusually high, it was not uncommon for whites to use racial violence to intimidate Blacks.

Mr. Bratton represented the deprived sharecroppers who became members of a new union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The new union was founded by a Black Delta native named Robert Hill. With no prior organizing experience, all Robert Hill had going for him was ambition. Mr. Hill said “the union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings which they work for,” as he asked Black sharecroppers to each persuade 25 new members to join a lodge.

http://blackmainstreet.net/never-forget-americas-forgotten-mass-lynching-237-black-sharecroppers-murdered-arkansas/

April V. Taylor

In an ironic display of white supremacy, Black residents in the historically African American East Oakland area are now being treated as menaces by white invading gentrifiers who are calling the cops on them for simply living life as they always have. A recent report by the East Bay Express reveals that the rate at which whites are calling police on innocent blacks is skyrocketing at an alarming rate.

Using data from the website Nextdoor.com, the publication was able to uncover cops being called for such harmless infractions as walking down the street and knocking on a door. Black salesman and postal workers who were simply doing their job have even faced harassment and been criminalized just for delivering items to residents.

As if existing Oakland police officers do not have a history of criminalizing and brutalizing Black residents enough, white residents have also taken to hiring private officers to patrol the neighborhood with even more tyranny. Oakland officers report that they are currently receiving more than 700 calls a month about suspicious vehicles and people, revealing that they are forced to respond to baseless, unwarranted calls from white residents who are racially profiling their neighbors.

As gentrification reverses white flight across the country, Black people are being subjected to racial profiling and white supremacy at the hands of invading white gentrifiers whose racial biases will continue unabated until there are some kind of legal repercussions for their harassment. Black residents are being forced to relocate by rising property taxes and the shattered tranquility of homes that are no longer the vibrant cultural centers they once were, and city officials are doing little to address the problem.

http://yourblackworld.net/2015/10/18/invading-white-gentrifiers-call-cops-on-black-residents-for-walking-down-street-knocking-on-doors/