Does “White Denial” Disprove “White Privilege”?

A Correspondence With Reality Check

Photo by Julian Paul on Unsplash

In 1988, Peggy McIntosh, a white feminist scholar, wrote a paper called White Privilege and Male Privilege. Here the term “white privilege” was coined and described as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions”. McIntosh listed 46 ways she had “white privilege”. Her list ranged from serious to trivial. Having little fear of the police during a traffic stop was an example of her white privilege, but so was talking with her mouthful and not having people think it was a habit of her race. McIntosh would eventually tell her readers not to generalize her paper, it was about her experience, not the experiences of all white people.

Unfortunately, McIntosh’s plea to keep her ideas in their proper autobiographical context was ignored. Today, the mainstream usage of “white privilege” implies white people have social advantages over other racial groups simply because they are white.

But does the mainstream usage of the term “white privilege” correspond with reality in the 21st century?

In 2016, there was a proposal to add a new racial category for people who descend from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) on the 2020 census. The 2010 census defined white as a person having origins with any of the original people from Europe, the Middle East…