Thoughts on Peggy McIntosh

I had to read and give an assessment of Peggy McIntosh's essay on White and Male privilege for my Feminist Philosophy class.

Peggy McIntosh writes about the parallel between white and male privilege. She defines privilege as “unearned assets” to which she is designed to be oblivious to. What these assets are exactly, she doesn’t exactly say, but she does give some personal examples of white privilege from her own life, carefully qualifying them as “not a scholarly analysis” and “not intended to be generalizable.” From this list she says there’s some similar male privilege, like being dominant in school teachings. She expresses her frustration at men for not seeing and denying this privilege. Given this, she takes a meritocracy to not exist in the US. She makes a helpful distinction in these privileges by saying that they aren’t unjust to have, and that everyone ought to have them. But distinct from that are certain privileges that are mutually exclusive to the rights and justice owed to others, such as the ability of the powerful to not listen to the not powerful. The remedy to these problems cannot be individual acknowledgments alone, rather, it had to be some kind of large scale systemic recognition and change.

Much like Lorde’s essay, much of this is unjustified. I found it to be particularly irritating when one replaces pop psychology with actual argumentation. McIntosh is aware of arguments made for a dominant male presence in the curriculum, namely that it is men who have made much what is important in western civilization. Not once does she challenge it on these grounds. I happen to agree with this line of reasoning (where is the female Shakespeare or female Mozart?) and so I was greatly disappointed to see that she did not interact with this argument. She just says it’s annoying when men don’t acknowledge their privilege. Why not chalk it up to an honest disagreement over the facts of the matter and be epistemically humble about the issue? I think she also makes a great and unwarranted leap from smaller instances of racism and privilege to a large systemic institutionalized kind. She doesn’t name an institution, an office or corporation, that unjustly discriminates against non-white males. Though she qualified her previous list as being non scholarly and not to be generalized, it seems she is doing just that. There are some other things I take issue with, like her assumption that whites were the only perpetrators in slavery, and that there were no white slaves and no black slave owners, and her assumption that racism is always mean or malicious but there can also be a nice kind of racism (which is part of what justified slavery in the US, that black people weren’t capable of taking care of themselves and so it was the white man's burden to take care of them), but those are minor details in comparison. I do agree with her distinction of privileges, but I think what that does is that it trivializes her project and reduces it to just a case by case matter of justice, and not some systemic monster to fight against.