The Mistaken Roots of White Privilege

The Quillette website has an article deconstructing the origination of the concept “white privilege.” Turns out it was proposed by Peggy McIntosh who grew up wealthy and privileged and mistakenly thinks she benefitted solely from being white when family wealth would explain most of her (unearned) advantages.

Even though the lifetime of privilege McIntosh has experienced is almost certainly due to her wealth and not the colour of her skin, she nevertheless found a way to share this irksome burden with the illiterate children of Kentucky coal miners, the hopeless peasants of the Appalachians, poor single mothers struggling to make ends meet on welfare, and the vast majority of whites in the United States and throughout the world who never had the chance to attend Radcliffe or Harvard. She simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin color.

Thus, not surfacing a reason to share her fortune with the less fortunate. She wouldn’t want to add fuel to the fires of socialism. Skin color, on the other hand, is pretty much a given, impossible to share with others of your generation.

COTTonLINE does not deny some degree of U.S. societal bias favoring those who appear to have European ancestry. It doesn’t take you far, however, if you’re both white and poor.

Oddly enough, a bias favoring lighter skin color is shared by places like India and China, Japan and Vietnam. It’s not just a Western bias. A list of places where this bias doesn't exist would be much the shorter list.