White Privilege by: Peggy McIntosh

Reflection


     When I was reading this article all i could think about was Lisa Delpit's piece, The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Predagogy in Educating Other People's Children.  When McIntosh spoke of unearned privileges I immediately thought of Delpit's Culture of power.  These two things are directly related in my eyes because in both instances white people are gaining unfair advantages over other races.  In White Privilege the author goes on and list twenty six ways that white people have advantages over black people. These are things that most people wouldn't think of if they had the white privilege.  The culture of power is essentially the same thing as this because white people are gaining advantages in everyday life just because of how they were brought up.  An example that we used in class was that if a student is playing with a puzzle and the teacher says, "is it time to be playing with the puzzle?" the student may say "yes i'm almost done with it.".  Even though in class we were talking about the culture of power this also works with white privilege because the white child would be privileged and know what the teacher actually means where as the student of another nationality may not know.  I think these two articles were directly related saying the same things in different ways.



During class i would like to discuss how similar Delpit's piece is to McIntosh's.  They are both talking about ways in which white people have advantages over other races.  Even though Delpit's piece is about schooling children of different races and McInthoshe's article is more in a general sense the two articles directly relate to one another.