Talking Point #1 McIntosh "White Privilege" quotes

Pg. 1
"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, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks."

This quote describes the power and privilege of white people that is there because of the color of their skin. They have not necessarily earned any of these privileges. These privileges are always carried like they are in an invisible knapsack like McIntosh says. I think that the most prevalent privileges in this "knapsack" described by McIntosh are what the author calls code books and blank checks.

Pg. 4
"For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; ones' life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own"


McIntosh is saying that white privilege is a hidden subject that no one really wants to discuss. If forced to face white privilege and discuss it, it makes us face the truth that most people get what they get through skin color, nationality, class, etc. rather than through earning these things.

Pg.4

"In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color."

Being white, McIntosh was given information and privileges that made the author "confident, comfortable, and oblivious". Because we are white, we are given the idea that we have no hostility and are not violent. These ideas were slowly pushed into our minds as ideas about people of color because of our skin color. Skin color should not be the reason for this but sadly it is.