Peggy McIntosh (born November 7, 1934) is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist of the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity).[1] She and Emily Style co-directed SEED for its first twenty-five years. She has written on curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, hierarchies in education and society, and professional development of teachers.
In 1988, she published the article "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies".[2] This analysis, and its shorter version, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1989),[2] pioneered putting the dimension of privilege into discussions of power, gender, race, class and sexuality in the United States. Both papers rely on personal examples of unearned advantage that McIntosh says she experienced in her lifetime, especially from 1970 to 1988. McIntosh encourages individuals to reflect on and recognize their own unearned advantages and disadvantages as parts of immense and overlapping systems of power. Her recent book, On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning: Selected Essays 1981-2019,[3] is a collection of her essays published over her career.
Education and teaching career
McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in New Jersey, where she attended public schools in Ridgewood and Summit, and spent one year at Kent Place School, before attending George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1956 summa cum laude with a degree in English. After spending a year at Bedford College, London, she became a teacher at the Brearley School, a girls' school in New York City, where she taught an "all-female curriculum." McIntosh went on to receive her PhD at Harvard University, where she wrote her dissertation on Emily Dickinson's Poems about Pain.[4] She has held teaching positions at what was then Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, DC, the University of Durham in England and the University of Denver, where she was tenured and experimented with "radical teaching methods in English, American Studies, and Women's Studies." With Dr. Nancy Hill, McIntosh co-founded the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute, which for thirty-five years annually gave "money and a room of one's own" to ten women who were not supported by other institutions and were working on projects in the arts and many other fields.
McIntosh has worked at what is now the Wellesley Centers for Women since 1979. More specifically, McIntosh served as the director of college programs at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, where she educated secondary school teachers on how their curriculum could change to be more inclusive of women's experiences.[5] McIntosh argued that all women, not just feminist leaders, deserve to have their history taught.[5] Informing the next generations about what women and other underdogs have been through gives a more holistic view of history.[5]
In 1986, she founded the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, which became the largest peer-led professional development project for educators in the United States, helping faculty to create curricula, teaching methods, and classroom climates that are multicultural, gender-fair, and inclusive of all students regardless of their backgrounds.[6] McIntosh and Emily Style co-directed the first 25 years of SEED. McIntosh currently serves as a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women.[7] She directs the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project, which provides workshops on privilege systems, feelings of fraudulence, and diversifying workplaces, curricula, and teaching methods.[8]
McIntosh was featured in Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible,[9] a documentary film produced by World Trust, revealing "what is often required [of people] to move through the stages of denial, defensiveness, guilt, fear, and shame into making a solid commitment to ending racial injustice."[10]
As a speaker, McIntosh has presented or co-presented at over 1,500 private and public institutions and organizations, including 26 campuses located in Asia.
Invisible knapsack
In her 1988 essay, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies",[11] McIntosh describes her understanding of "white privilege" as unearned advantage based on race, which can be observed both systemically and individually, like all unearned privileges in society (such as those related to class, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or ability). After observing and investigating what she calls "unacknowledged male privilege" held unconsciously by men, McIntosh concluded that, since hierarchies in society are interlocking, she probably experienced a "white privilege" analogous to male privilege. McIntosh used the metaphor of white privilege as "an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks".[11]:2
In her original 1988 essay, McIntosh listed forty-six of her own everyday advantages, such as "I can go shopping most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed"; "I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race"; and "If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race."[11]:3
McIntosh has stated that in order to study systems of advantage and disadvantage as they impact individuals, "Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one's place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents' places of origin, or your parents' relationship to education, to money, or to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background."[12] She believes that all people in the U.S. have a combination of systemic, unearned advantages and disadvantages. She feels that it is not possible to do work against racism without doing work against white privilege, anymore than it is possible to do work against sexism without doing work against male privilege.
In 1989, the original "White Privilege and Male Privilege" essay was edited down and entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack".[13] Both the long and short pieces showcase the white privilege McIntosh experiences on a daily basis; through an extensive list of examples McIntosh illustrates that white privilege is like an intangible gift of unearned entitlement, unearned advantage, and unearned dominance. Privilege gives white people easier access to political and societal benefits that people of color are denied. This work has been included in many K-12 and higher education course materials, and has been cited as an influence for later social justice commentators.[14][15][16]
McIntosh has written other articles on white privilege, including "White Privilege: Color and Crime";[17] "White Privilege, An Account to Spend";[18] and "White People Facing Race: Uncovering the Myths that Keep Racism in Place".[19]
Rocky Mountain Women's Institute
McIntosh co-founded the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute with Nancy K. Hill in 1976. The organization disbanded in 2009. The Denver Public Library has material from this group in their archives.[20]
SEED Project
McIntosh founded the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum ("Seeking Educational Equity & Diversity") in 1986. Emily Style, as founding co-director, partnered with McIntosh for the SEED Project's first twenty-five years. From 2001 until 2011, Brenda Flyswithhawks joined them as the third co-director. SEED has become the largest peer-led faculty development project for educators in the US. McIntosh believed that teachers were capable of being the leaders of their own adult development with regard to teaching equitably and inclusively. Monthly peer-led SEED seminars are designed as round-table testimonies about teachers' past and present experiences in life and in schooling. This is a teaching technique McIntosh coined as Serial Testimony, which she developed after realizing that systems of power had taught her to ignore or downplay the experiences of others in order to elevate herself in society.[21] Participants would tell their story one by one in a set time interval without any questions from others.[21] Instead of being told what is correct, she wanted participants to teach each other by telling each other about their own life experiences within the context of the material.[21] Connecting what has happened to them and others with the subject material increases interest in learning and helps them see how they relate to society.[21]
Seminar members, including parents and community members, become more aware of their experiences of systemic oppression associated with their gender, race, class, and sexual orientation, inside and outside of the structures of schooling. The SEED discussions help teachers to develop ways of implementing gender-fair and globally-informed curricula for their students.
Since the first SEED Project meeting in 1987, SEED has trained 2,200 K-16 teachers in 40 US states and 14 other countries, indirectly impacting millions of students. The SEED Project has been funded by private donors, local school support, and 15 foundations, including the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. In 2011, McIntosh stepped down as the project's co-director.
Other Projects
As previously mentioned before, McIntosh has worked on the SEED Project, but she has a few archived projects, such as the Gender, Equity, and Model Sites (GEMS) and a more recent three year plan on improving teacher quality using the results from the SEED Project. This project lasted from 2011 to 2014. It was created in hopes to expand the influence of the National SEED Project to be more inclusive to educators, children, and familles.
Awards and recognition
McIntosh has received four honorary degrees, as well as being the recipient of the Klingenstein Award for Distinguished Educational Leadership from Columbia Teachers College.[22] She was awarded the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Centennial Medal of 2021.[23] The Centennial Medal is the highest honor that GSAS bestows[24]
Publications
McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies. Working paper No. 189. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Wellesley Center for Research on Women.
McIntosh, P. (1998). White privilege, color and crime: A personal account. In Mann, C. R., & Zatz, M. (Eds.), Images of color, images of crime (pp.207–216). Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company.
McIntosh, P. (2009). White privilege: An account to spend. St. Paul, Minnesota: Saint Paul Foundation.
McIntosh, P. (2009). White people facing race: Uncovering the myths that keep racism in place. St. Paul, Minnesota: Saint Paul Foundation.
McIntosh, P. (1985). Feeling like a fraud. Work in progress No. 18. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Stone Center Working Paper Series.
McIntosh, P. (1989). Feeling like a fraud – Part II. Work in progress No. 37. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Stone Center Working Paper Series
McIntosh, P. (2000). Feeling like a fraud – Part III: Finding authentic ways of coming into conflict. Work in progress No. 90. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Stone Center Working Paper Series.
McIntosh, P. (2019). Feeling Like A Fraud, Part IV: The Psyche as Singular and Plural. In McIntosh, P. (2019). On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning: Selected Essays 1981-2019 (pp.107–118). New York: Routledge.
McIntosh, P. (1983). Interactive phases of curricular re-vision: A feminist perspective. Working Paper No. 124. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.
McIntosh, P. (1990). Interactive phases of curricular and personal re-vision with regard to race. Working Paper No. 219. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Wellesley Centers for Women.
McIntosh, P. & Style, E. (1994). Faculty-centered faculty development. In Bassett, P. & Crosier, L. M. (Eds.), Looking ahead: Independent school issues and answers. Washington, D.C.: Avocus Publishing, Inc.
McIntosh, P. & Style, E. (1999). Social, Emotional, and Political Learning. In Cohen, J. (1999). Educating minds and hearts: Social emotional learning and the passage into adolescence (pp.137–157). New York: Teachers College Press.
McIntosh, P., Badger, Chen, J., P. Gillette, P., Gordon, B., Mahabir, H., & Mendoza, R. (2015, Summer). Teacher self-knowledge: The deeper learning. Independent School Magazine, 74(4).
McIntosh, P. (2019). On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning: Selected Essays 1981-2019 (pp.107–118). New York: Routledge.
Related Research Articles
Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial grouping of current and former women's colleges in the northeastern United States.
White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege, the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and a source of systemic racism, and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the societal compositions, perceptions and group behaviors of white people. It is an interdisciplinary arena of inquiry that has developed beginning in the United States from white trash studies and critical race studies, particularly since the late 20th century. It is focused on what proponents describe as the cultural, historical and sociological aspects of people identified as white, and the social construction of "whiteness" as an ideology tied to social status.
White privilege, or white skin privilege, is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism and imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade, white privilege has developed in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges, various national citizenships, and other rights or special benefits.
Mabelle Massey Segrest, known as Mab Segrest, is an American lesbian feminist, writer, scholar and activist. Segrest is best known for her 1994 autobiographical work Memoir of a Race Traitor, which won the Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. Segrest is the former Fuller-Matthai Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College.
Male privilege is the system of advantages or rights that are available to men on the basis of their sex. A man's access to these benefits may vary depending on how closely they match their society's ideal masculine norm.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American scholar of Classics. She is the Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she previously worked from 1959 to 2005. She has published ten books over the course of her career.
Peggy Ann Pascoe was an American historian. She was the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She was a member of the University of Oregon History Department from 1996 until her death on July 23, 2010. Prior to her work at UO, Pascoe worked as an assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Utah, where she taught courses on women’s history, race, and sexuality. Pascoe’s work centers on the history of race, gender, and sexuality, with a particular investment in law and the U.S. West. Together with George Lipsitz, Earl Lewis, George Sanchez, and Dana Takagi, Pascoe edited the influential American Crossroads book series in Ethnic Studies, published by the University of California Press. Pascoe held this position for fifteen years.
Social privilege is an advantage or entitlement that benefits individuals belonging to certain groups, often to the detriment of others. Privileged groups can be advantaged based on social class, wealth, education, caste, age, height, skin color, physical fitness, nationality, geographic location, cultural differences, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, neurodiversity, physical disability, sexual orientation, religion, and other differentiating factors. Individuals can be privileged in one area, such as education, and not privileged in another area, such as health. The amount of privilege any individual has may change over time, such as when a person becomes disabled, or when a child becomes a young adult.
Conor Renier Friedersdorf is an American journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic, known for his civil libertarian perspectives.
Feminist pedagogy is a pedagogical framework grounded in feminist theory. It embraces a set of epistemological theories, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships. Feminist pedagogy, along with other kinds of progressive and critical pedagogy, considers knowledge to be socially constructed.
Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble was an influential American psychologist from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. Gamble published most of her work on audition and memory influenced by Georg Elias Müller, Edward B. Titchener, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Ernst Heinrich Weber. Despite her chronic eye conditions she was successful in editing volumes of textbooks, her own papers, and directing many master's degree students. She earned her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1889. She went on to obtain her doctorate from Cornell University in 1898. She held several teaching positions over the course of her career and was a member of several influential organizations including the American Psychological Association (APA). Gamble was a distinguished and well-liked professor at Wellesley College for more than two decades, and by 1930 she was the head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology following the death of Mary Whiton Calkins. At the time of her death she was professor of psychology and director of the psychological laboratory at Wellesley College.
Brittany N. Packnett Cunningham is an American activist and the co-founder of Campaign Zero. She served as executive director for Teach for America in St. Louis, Missouri, then as a member of President Barack Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is a 1989 essay written by American feminist scholar and anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh. It covers 50 examples, or hidden benefits, from her perspective, of the privilege white people experience in everyday life.
Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of the Centre for Research in Race & Education at the University of Birmingham. Her work explores the achievements and experiences of minority ethnic groups in education with a focus on how processes of racism, exclusion and marginalisation operate in predominantly White spaces.
White defensiveness is a term to describe defensive responses by white people to discussions of societal discrimination, structural racism, and white privilege. The term has been applied to characterize the responses of white people to portrayals of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonization, or scholarship on the legacy of those systems in modern society. Academics and historians have identified multiple forms of white defensiveness, including white denial, white diversion, and white fragility, the last of which was popularized by scholar Robin DiAngelo.
Aph Ko is an American writer, vegan activist, and digital media producer. She is the author of Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out (2019), co-author of Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters (2017), and creator of the website Black Vegans Rock.
White privilege is a tenet of Critical Race Theory and some other academic disciplines asserting societal privilege based on skin lightness.
Privilege Hazard is a concept introduced by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein in their book Data Feminism,referring to the phenomenon where individuals in privileged positions remain unaware of their inherent advantages. This lack of awareness perpetuates societal inequalities and obstructs efforts to advocate for marginalized groups. Privilege hazard is cited by other authors to acknowledge their positionality and risk of misinterpretating others' experiences. Authors such as Felicia Pratto, Andrew Stewart, Peggy McIntosh and Taylor Phillips have contributed to this discourse by examining various forms of privilege hazards, including group dominance, white, male and class privilege. This exploration sheds light on how privilege manifests in different societal spheres and its implications for marginalized communities.
1 2 3 Coons, Phyllis (March 11, 1984). "Integrating Women in Curriculum". Boston Globe. ProQuest294172621.
↑ “About Us.” National SEED Project. National SEED Project, Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, 2013–2014. Web. October 6, 2014. Nationalseedproject.orgArchived September 21, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
↑ WCW Researchers.” Wellesley College. Trustees of Wellesley College. Web. March 16, 2017. Wellesley.edu
↑ McIntosh, Peggy (1998). "White Privilege, Color, and Crime: A Personal Account". In Mann, Coramae Richey (ed.). Images of Color, Images of Crime. Roxbury Publishing. OCLC603946451.
↑ McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege, An Account to Spend." The Saint Paul Foundation. St Paul, Minnesota. 2009
↑ McIntosh, Peggy. "White People Facing Race: Uncovering the Myths that Keep Racism in Place." The Saint Paul Foundation. St Paul, Minnesota. 2009
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
