Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege

Quotes: Choose three quotes from the text and explain what they mean and their relevance to the text.

Quote 1: "whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others this is seen as work that will allow 'them' to be more like 'us'."

This quote from McIntosh helps better understand what Delpit would call the "Culture of power".  White's see themselves as the ideal race and that everyone else has to conform to their way of living, speaking, etc.  One of the points McIntosh makes is that a white person can swear or wear "second-hand clothes" and not be looked at as a bad representation of their entire race.  How ever, if a black person dress and speaks like that, they are looked at as an entire race and that gives that race a bad name.  McIntosh's 26 points are very similar to the 5 rules that Delpit talks about.  This is relevant to the text because it shows how white men have an "advantage" over everyone else.  As McIntosh says, whiteness can protect a person from hostility, distress, and violence.

Quote 2: "I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person."

A person who is born into the culture of power is going to know the codes and just assume that everyone else around them knows that codes.  Like Dr. Bogad said in class, if a teacher who is in the culture of power asks a student who isn't in the culture of power, "Is it time to be playing with that puzzle right now?" The student won't understand that the teacher is really asking.  If we do not teach the children at a young age that there is more than one way to talk to people and that there is a certain place and time for each, then the cycle will keep going.  The children will never learn to try to break that barrier of the culture of power.

Quote 3: "Men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged."

This shows that men, especially white men, are not willing to admit that they have special privileges when it comes to jobs, property ownership, credit etc.  White men also have a code that they follow but don't seem to realize they are doing it.  It shows that in a society, men will acknowledge that women do not have the same rights as them but they will never say that they have more rights than women.  This goes along with the ways of the culture of power.  Those who hold the power do not realize that they hold it until explicitly told.