“White Priviledge..”& “Age, Race, Class, and Sex..”

The articles for this week in my women’s studies class we were instructed to read two articles; “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh, and “Age, Race, Class and sex: Women Redefining differences” by Audre Lorde.

Each article explains the reality of how our world is conditioned to view a certain skin complexion, and sex as “superior”. The two authors are of different groups. Peggy McIntosh is a white women who has been raised by a traditional non-racial white family. While Audre Lorde is a black lesbian mother of two. She goes on to say that she is dating a white woman. Which means she also is within an interracial couple. Many people in the world today would not agree with her entire lifestyle. She says “I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong” (Lorde, 1980)

I first will address Peggy McIntosh’s article where she really goes in depth to stress the lack of equivalence that inferior groups such as woman and African American’s have. She states that men will not admit their over privilege, but will admit that woman are disadvantaged. This made me think do men believe that woman place themselves in this under privileged category. Men claim to want to improve women’s status, but I feel that it’s all a lie being that men do not truly even realize how unfair things are. McIntosh obviously growing up in a non-racial family learned that racism was just something which puts others at a disadvantage. She believes that from a young age other white children are taught to not see the privileges of whites as anything major. Just as males are conditioned to not see any male privilege.

McIntosh’s colleague Elizabeth Minnich says that “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 which will allow “them” to be more like “us.” This awful truth reveals that whites view other races as only wanting handout. As if all opposing races are lazy, and cannot work for whatever it is they want. McIntosh list over twenty different examples of things that her as a white woman has no problem with, but says that her African American friends, co-workers, and acquaintances would have problems with trying to do in a variety of settings. As she goes on listing examples I realize as a black female just how true the statements were.

For Audre Lorde’s article she not only focused on the disadvantages of African Americans and women, but instead she mentions Third World people, elderly, and the working class. And similar to the point that Peggy McIntosh was trying to push Lorde also says that the problem with the society is that we are refusing to recognize the differences, and embrace. We instead view these differences as some type of barriers that hinder and limit one another.

The norm,”… White, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (Lorde, 1980) says Lorde. Elderly are looked passed because the society in which we are becoming is trying to ignore the past. Lorde attempts the stress that instead of learning from the past we find ourselves repeating and relearning repetitive lessons. Simply because we did not pass the knowledge on.

From these two articles I have learned that the problem within society seems to be “realization”. When we realize the oppression? When will we notice how the white man views us basically as something to right off on his taxes? The more we continue to allow history to repeat instead of passing on lessons and listening to our elderly we will only push ourselves back deeper into oppression.