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Date Posted: Friday, October 01, 11:32:01am
Author: J Warner
Subject: From Peggy McIntosh
In reply to: Spartacus 's message, "Prove it still exists" on Friday, October 01, 10:51:06am

Not by any means an exhaustive list.....

http://www.cpt.org/files/UR%20-%20White%20Privilege%20-%20McIntosh.pdf

http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf

These are examples of "white privilege"

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company
of people of my race most of the time.
2. The day I move into new housing that I have
chosen, I can be pretty sure that my new
neighbors will be neutral or pleasant to me.
3. When I am told about our national heritage or
about “civilization,” I am shown that people of
my color made it what it is.
4. I can be sure that my children will be given
curricular materials that testify to the
existence of their race in all classes, in all
subjects, at all grade levels.
5. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a
publisher for this work on white privilege.
6. I can go into a supermarket and find the
staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions,
or into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone
who can cut my hair.
7. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes
without having people attribute these choices
to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy
of my race.
8. I can do well in a challenging situation without
being called a credit to my race.
9. I am never asked to speak for all the people
of my racial group.
10. I can remain oblivious of the language and
customs of persons of color who constitute
the world’s majority without feeling in my
culture any penalty for such oblivion.
11. I can criticize our government and talk about
how much I fear its policies and behavior
without being seen as a cultural outsider.
12. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture
books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and
children’s magazines featuring people of my
race.
13. I can go home from most meetings of
organizations to which I belong feeling some
what tied in, rather than isolated, out of
place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a
distance, or feared.
14. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in
“flesh” color and have them more or less
match my skin.
15. I can turn on the television or open to the front
page of the newspaper and see people of my
race widely and positively represented.
16. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash,
I can count on my skin color not to work
against the appearance of financial
responsibility.
17. I can arrange to protect my children most of
the time from people who might not like them.
18. I can take a job with an affirmative action
employer without having co-workers on the
job suspect that I got it because of race.
19. I can choose public accommodation without
fearing that people of my race cannot get in or
will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
20. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical
help, my race will not work against me.
21. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need
not ask of each negative episode or situation
whether it has racial overtones.
22. If a cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits our
tax return, I can be sure it is not because of
my race.
23. If I get angry and ask to speak to the “person
in charge,” I can be fairly sure I will be talking
to a person of my race.
24. I did not need to teach out children about
systemic racism for their own daily physical
protection.
25. I can go shopping alone in department stores
near my house without being followed or
harassed by store detectives on the grounds
that I may be shoplifting or soliciting.
26. We were able to teach our children that the
police were their allies, and that they should
dial 911 if they had and emergency.
27. In my neighborhood, I can be sure that the
police will not harass me because of the color
of my skin.
28. In my neighborhood, any police officer who
might need to arrest people in my family is
likely to be a person of my race.
29. Criminality is not imputed to me as a genetic
component of racial character; I am not
assumed to belong to a group of people
predisposed to crime.
30. The word “criminal” in the dominant culture
does not conjure up the faces of people
whose skin color is like that of my father,
mother, brother, sister, husband, nieces, or
nephews.
31. I have never heard or read the suggestion
that ll the people of my color ought to be
locked up or killed. Even Islamic
fundamentalists do not call for the killing of all
people of my color, only certain “morally
corrupt” ones.
32. In World War II my grandparents, despite
having German ancestors two generations
ago, were not locked up by the U.S.
government in internment camps on the
suspicion or pretext that they might be
traitors.
33. Nearly all of the lawyers and judges who
study, write about, argue, debate, and
practice law in the U.S. are people of my
race.
34. Lawbreaking by the U.S. government with
regard to treaties with Indian people was not
taught to me as a criminal aspect of my racial
heritage.
35. Deceiving Indians is not described as a
genetic or inherited trait of Caucasians.
36. Refusing to honor Indian treaties today is not
shown to me as lawbreaking by white people.
37. The U.S. government has never made it a
crime for me to speak my native language or
observe the religious ceremonies of my
parents and grandparents.
38. The prison system is thoroughly controlled by
people of my race.
39. The constitution I am subject to was created
by people of my ethnic heritage to apply to
some people of my ethnic heritage and to not
apply to people of other races.
40. I am assumed to be entitled to whatever legal
defense I can afford, even if it allows me to be
acquitted of a crime I have committed.
41. If I am suspected of being guilty but am
acquitted, I will be seen as someone who got
through the cracks rather than as a person
who especially deserved not to get through
the cracks.
42. Those who have been able to afford the high
costs of legal training have been, for the most
part, people of my race.
43. Lawyers featured as experts by the media are
overwhelmingly people of my race.
44. Those who have been able to pay lawyers’
fees and legal costs have for the most part
been people of my race.
45. A successful tax evader in my ethnic group is
usually portrayed as a cheater or even a
victor, but not as an innate criminal or a
representative of a whole race of people who
drain society.
46. A deadbeat dad in my ethnic group is
portrayed in the media as financially but not
sexually irresponsible.
47. When I walk into the courthouses of my
country, I can expect respectful treatment
from the receptionists.
48. As a child, I heard jokes and sound tracks
that cast people of other races as habitually
dumb and coarse, or else sneaky, shifty, sly,
malicious, or underhanded, and left people of
my race protected from such typecasting.
49. The voiceovers of criminals, shifty individuals,
and villains in Disney films and in ads rarely
sound like people of my racial/ethnic group.
50. If I stand in line at the bank teller’s window, no
one looks strangely at me, as though they
have a problem with my being there.
51. If I suffer damages and decide to take a case
to court, the people I see in the legal system
will probably be people who were trained to
trust my kind and me.
52. I can stand behind another person at an ATM
machine without being feared as a potential
mugger.
53. If I am laughing with friends on a street at
night, it is not assumed that we are in a gang.
54. A realtor has never discriminated against me
to “protect property values.”
55. No one has ever suggested that I might have
dealt drugs in order to afford a certain car or
house.
56. The men of my race who took 400 billion
dollars in the 1994 U.S. S & L (savings and
loan) scandal are not branded as criminals or
seen as enemies of the U.S. people, even
though the money has never been returned.
57. When I think of prisons, I do not have to think
of people of my race as disproportionately
serving time in them, having longer than
average sentences, and being executed in
greater numbers.
58. I am allowed to believe, and encouraged to
believe, that people of my race are in general
law-abiding rather than law-breaking.
59. TV shows and films show people of my color
as the main defenders of law and order;
cleverest detectives, best lawyers and judges,
and wiliest outlaws.
60. Portrayals of white males on TV as criminals
and violent individuals do not incriminate me
as a Caucasian; these males, even the
outlaws, are usually presented as strong men
of a quintessentially American type.
61. Illegal acts by the U.S. government, in the
present and in the past, around the world, are
not attributed by whites to Caucasian
immorality and illegality.
62. Bad race relations in the United States are
not attributed by whites to criminal behavior,
despite a history of race-related breaking of
laws by whites over the entire span of Anglo-
European life on this continent.

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