{"id":67844,"date":"2018-08-31T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T16:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=67844"},"modified":"2020-09-20T21:37:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T02:37:05","slug":"unpacking-peggy-mcintosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=67844","title":{"rendered":"Unpacking Peggy McIntosh"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag<\/i>, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege. <\/a><\/p>\n

I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term “White Privilege” sprang – “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack<\/a>”\u00a0<\/em>by one Peggy McIntosh:<\/p>\n

Urban Progressive\u00a0Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag\u00a0of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who\u00a0has\u00a0<\/em>that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual \u201ccone of silence\u201d immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group\u2019s stated principles. \u00a0As we in Human\u00a0studies work to reveal Urban Progressive\u00a0Privilege and ask urban progressives\u00a0to become aware\u00a0of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive\u00a0Privilege must ask, \u201chaving described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was, to a degree, satire – and, like a lot of satire, it was simultaneously journalism.\u00a0 \u00a0 Privilege\u00a0does\u00a0<\/em>exist in our society – but social, economic, educational and geographic\u00a0class\u00a0<\/em>at the end of the day count for (I’ll be charitable) every bit as much as race.\u00a0 \u00a0Can anyone say that Clarence Thomas is held in lower regard (by people other than Ryan Winkler, anyway) than John Roberts?<\/p>\n

I wrote the piece originally because the ideal that “whiteness” – whatever that means, as if a “race” that simultaneously includes Norwegians and Armenians, Slavs and Spaniards, has any actual ethnic meaning – conveys so much privilege by itself that a white house painter in Spooner Wisconsin has social, cultural, financial and legal advantage over Oprah Winfrey or Sarah Jeong is so comically absurd.<\/p>\n

So absurd, I thought, that it\u00a0had\u00a0<\/em>to have been written by someone who was so detached by\u00a0class privilege\u00a0<\/em>that they hadn’t the foggiest idea what life was like outside of their class bubble.<\/p>\n

Lo and behold, I was right.<\/p>\n

William Ray digs into Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack in this brightly illuminating piece in Quillette<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I say “I was right” – well, I was being modest:<\/p>\n

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average\u2014that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh\u2019s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. At that time, Bell Labs were the world leaders in the nascent digital computing revolution. Means personally held\u2014and sold patents on\u2014many very lucrative technologies, including early magnetic Gyro-compass equipment (U.S. Patent #US2615961A) which now helps to guide nuclear missiles and commercial jets, and which keeps satellites in place so you can navigate with your phone and communicate with your Uber driver. Means is also recorded as the inventor of a patent held by Nokia Bell in 1959 known as the Information Storage Arrangement. This device is the direct progenitor of ROM computer memory, and is cited in the latter\u2019s patent filed in 1965 for IBM. So, long before Peggy McIntosh wrote her paper, her family was already having an outsized effect on Western culture.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America\u2019s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times\u2018s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago\u2019s Mayor Daley. McIntosh\u2019s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees…[husband] Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.<\/p>\n

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America\u2019s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Peggy McIntosh is the scion – scienne?\u00a0 Scionette? – of a family that is in the top fraction of the top 1% of people in this country in terms of social, educational (or at least “Educational Affiliation”), financial and cultural stature.<\/p>\n

And this leads up to a summation that could soon become a Berg’s 7th Law corollary:<\/p>\n

Her \u2018experiential\u2019 list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And – I’d add, from my position as an observer – it provided cover for the vastly more toxic “Urban Progressive Privilege”.\u00a0 \u00a0Ray says nearly as much:<\/p>\n

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about \u2018white privilege\u2019 is traceable to an \u2018experiential\u2019 essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh\u2019s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose\u2014it helped to mainstream a bitter\u00a0zero-sum politics<\/a>\u00a0of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Progressivism” has ended up on the “wrong” side of the class war it has always espoused: they are the patricians, and have been for over a century now.<\/p>\n

Idenitymongering – and the firehose of “privilege” allegations that are one of its weapons – is one way of dividing the unruly plebes against each other, as Ray points out:<\/p>\n

A school board in British Columbia even thought it would be a good idea to greet its poor and working class white middle school students with this poster reminding them of the\u00a0guilty burden they bear<\/a>\u00a0on account of their skin:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"

No, it’s not a flyer for a community theater production of “1984”. Yet.<\/p><\/div>\n

I grew up a very poor white kid. By which I mean, single-mother-on-welfare-in-Alberta poor. As a child, I remember feeling utterly hopeless about ever making any sort of life for myself. If I were at school in British Columbia today, I would now have to deal with seeing this admonition every morning as well. One wonders why Teresa Downs doesn\u2019t simply step down from her $200,000 a year job and pass it to a person of colour since she acquired it unfairly. Is her public declaration of culpability supposed to be compensation enough? Presumably, like Peggy McIntosh, she has convinced herself that human well-being will be better served by shaming the children of people whose average annual income is around $23,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suggest you read the whole thing; as much as I pullquoted, there is so much more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege. I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[337,349],"tags":[213],"class_list":["post-67844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-privilege","category-urban-liberal-privilege-liberal-tyranny","tag-winkler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67844"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67861,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67844\/revisions\/67861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}