The Real Origins of "White Privilege"
In 1989, Peace and Freedom Magazine published an essay by Peggy McIntosh, entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. In the 2020s, we’re all familiar with this concept - the gist of it being that, all other conditions being equal, white skin grants an individual certain social and economic benefits. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the emergent field of “whiteness studies”, beginning with Richard Dyer’s “White”1 (published in 1988), began to scrutinize the privileges enjoyed by the dominant white majority. The white privilege concept was also incorporated into Critical Race Theory as a key ideological building block, and a complement to systemic racism.
Much of the scholarship surrounding “whiteness” and white privilege pertains to non-material privileges, such as representation in media or the privilege of being recognized as the normative default identity. But without an empirically measurable economic impact, “white privilege” would be at worst slightly dangerous or perhaps alienating or annoying to minority groups. Yet the idea of “white privilege” is controversial precisely because it’s not entirely clear that sufficient ambient societal prejudice still exists in the 2020s to the extent that having white skin2 is strongly causally linked to economic success factors. Certainly, one could easily point to incarceration rates, median household income, or other standard economic metrics, to demonstrate the benefits of being white as opposed to being black. In 2019, the median household income for non-Hispanic white people in the United States was estimated to be about $76,057, compared with only $46,073 for black people.3
Yet this doesn’t lend much credence to the idea that there’s some sort of anti-black or pro-white institutional forces operating blindly throughout our society. For one thing, other non-white cohorts (such as Asians) exceed the median household income of whites. The median household income among Asians is $98,174, which is 29% better than the median white household income. Furthermore, the term “black” is somewhat misleading, because black people in the United States really represent two (or more) economically distinct cohorts. On the one hand, we have “native” African American black people, i.e. black people whose ancestors were victims of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. On the other hand, we have black immigrants who migrated to the United States from Sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean within the past 50 years. The latter group outperforms the former group in almost every economic metric, and in fact, immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria out-perform white people by most economic metrics.
In 2017, the median household income of Nigerian-Americans was $68,658, about 10% higher than the overall median household income of $61,9374, and slightly higher than the 2017 non-Hispanic white median household income of $67,617.5 A representation of racial income disparity in the United States in 2017, that separates Nigerians from other black cohorts, would look like:
Additionally, according to a 2015 study by the Migration Policy Institute6:
Nigerian diaspora households and US households were equally likely to be in the higher income brackets. Twenty five percent of households in both of these groups reported annual incomes greater than $90,000 and 10 percent reported annual income exceeding $140,000.
And according to a 2008-2012 study by the US Census Bureau7, Nigerians had:
higher median earnings ($50,922 for men, $44.894 for women) than the U.S. population as a whole ($48,629 for men, $37,842 for women).
a poverty rate of 12.8% (lower than the national rate of 14.9%)
However, the study also reported a lower home-ownership rate among Nigerians than the national rate of 65.5%.
Additionally, a 2013 report entitled “Successful Black Immigrants Narrow Black-White Achievement Gaps” indicates that many achievement gaps between white and black people in the United States significantly decrease if you only count the African immigrant population (i.e. you exclude the descendants of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade victims). For example, in 2011, 7.56% of all black males in the US, aged 21-65, were incarcerated, while only 1.3% of white males were incarcerated. Yet only 1.74% of black African immigrants were incarcerated - which is very close to the rate for white males. In other words, if we only count black African immigrants, the gap between incarceration rates for whites and blacks almost disappears. A number of other black/white economic gaps shrinks as well, such as college completion rates, employment statistics, and marriage rates.8
Of course, African immigrants only arrive in the United States in the first place after passing through a certain selection filter. Due to the barriers of immigration, immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are often selected from among those individuals who have already risen to the top percentiles of economic success. Note, however, that this does not lend any credence to the “white privilege” hypothesis. If the white privilege hypothesis is correct, we should expect successful African immigrants to experience significant social and economic barriers after they arrive in America and become subject to the white supremacist system that systematically rewards whiteness and punishes blackness. Yet we do not observe this happening. Black African immigrants, particularly those from Ghana and Nigeria, arrive in the United States and subsequently prosper to the same extent as white people on average. The college graduation rate alone among Nigerian Americans, far exceeds that of whites and the national average9.
By almost any metric, the “white privilege” hypothesis mostly falls apart. When different black cohorts are taken into account, black skin is not a predictor of poverty and failure, nor is white skin a predictor of prosperity and success. If anything, our current system favors East Asians, Indians, Iranians, Nigerians, and Ghanaians. And among white people, Australians, Macedonians, Russians, Lithuanians, Italians and Israelis significantly outperform Polish, Danish, Irish and Canadian Americans.10 Yet Indians, Taiwanese, Pakistani and Filipino Americans, for example, outperform all white groups except for Australian and South African Americans. Clearly, white skin is not causally linked to better outcomes within our current system.
Unpack this Knapsack
Yet despite this readily available economic data, the white privilege hypothesis is almost taken for granted among progressive circles, as well as among polite society and Ivy League institutions. It’s possible there’s some psychological benefits (largely outweighed by other factors) to having white skin, which come along with being a member of the majority group. These subtle benefits were expounded upon by Peggy McIntosh in her seminal 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”.11 Examples of these subtle benefits include things like:
[As a white person], I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.
This set of benefits mostly reduces to representation in media, which is often a function of majority privilege. Regardless, minority representation in media has improved considerably since 1989. (Consider the cast of Friends and Seinfeld compared with the cast of whatever new series are currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu.)
Other, more significant benefits listed by McIntosh include:
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
These sort of privileges are also highly questionable. It’s certainly true that certain cohorts, such as blacks and Hispanics, have observably worse outcomes when interacting with the United States healthcare system.12 But is this really a function of white privilege? And are Asian or Indian Americans consistently harassed while shopping alone? The crux of the problem here is not that white skin (or conceptual “whiteness”) bestows some kind of social or economic advantage - it’s that certain cohorts are uniquely disadvantaged due to various historical, socio-economic and (yes) cultural factors. It’s also true that basic human neural wiring employs an internal Bayesian prior probability distribution to make judgments about other people, which can create feedback loops with pre-existing socio-economic disadvantages, thereby perpetuating subtle prejudices (such as, for example, biased police profiling13). But by simply juxtaposing the economic performance of Nigerian or Ghanaian Americans against white Americans, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate that these subtle prejudices are not strong enough to enforce an economic disadvantage, and that black skin is therefore not causally linked to poverty or marginalization within our system.
The True Origins of “White Privilege”
Peggy McIntosh’s conception of “White Privilege” is so weak, it’s hard to imagine that anyone takes it seriously anymore in the 2020s. And yet, here we are. To understand the real reason why white privilege became such a fundamental tenet among the progressive left, we need to understand the origin of the concept. In fact, white privilege is the crucial evolutionary link between the classical Marxism of the New Left that emphasized class struggles, and the strain of Neo-Marxism14 that analyzes race (or identity) struggles. In a previous post, I examined the history of radical student activism across college campuses, beginning with various student disruptions and protests in the late 2010s, followed by similar disruptions that occurred in the late 1960s.
Long before Derrick Bell created Critical Race Theory or Peggy McIntosh wrote some stuff about invisible knapsacks, the New Left of the late 1960s held internal discussions about the concept of “White-skin Privilege” and how it applied to the Socialist revolution they were trying to catalyze in the United States. An organization called the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) - an explicitly Marxist organization that radicalized college students in the 1960s - published a weekly “underground magazine” called New Left Notes. In the March 3, 1968 edition of New Left Notes there is a lengthy article written by Noel Ignatin (later known as Noel Ignatiev - who would go on to become a Harvard professor who taught about “whiteness”). 15
Ignatiev laid out a hypothesis to explain why all attempts at a Socialist revolution in the United States had failed: white-skin privilege had prevented white workers from uniting with black workers, despite the fact that both groups shared common interests. Because of white-skin privilege, white workers tended to side with the capitalist class, against their own interests, instead of uniting with black workers and overthrowing the capitalists via socialist revolution.
At the time Ignatiev wrote this article in 1968, the prevailing revolutionary strategy among the New Left was to unite the white and black working class against their common enemy: the rich capitalist class. But Ignatiev believed this strategy was doomed to failure.
The problem, says Ignatiev, is “white supremacist thinking”. Ignatiev does not mean literal white supremacy as in the ideological belief in the superiority of the “white race”. The concept of “white supremacist thinking” described here is very close to the modern, social justice concept of white supremacy, meaning a generalized conscious or unconscious systemic marginalization of black people by white society. However, Ignatiev’s version of “white supremacy” is more specifically rooted in the corrupt labor unions of the time, unlike the modern version, which applies to society in general. Ignatiev writes:
White supremacist thinking, while it is part of a mind-set, is not a pure question of ideology. It has real roots in the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites. The Al Capones who run this country had made a deal with the labor officials and, through them, with the totality of white working people. The terms of the deal, which was a long time in the working out, are simply these: you white workers support us in our enslavement of the non-white majority of the Earth's population, and we will reward you with a monopoly of skilled jobs, education and health facilities superior to those of the non-whites, the opportunity to occasionally promote one of your number out of the laboring class, social privileges and a whole series of privileges befitting your white skin.
The connection between “white privilege” and corrupt labor unions suggested by Ignatiev has been completely lost in modern discourse, along with a lot of the classical Marxist baggage. Additionally, the concept had not yet been fully refined and repackaged as “whiteness”, a privilege-granting social construct that is theoretically orthogonal to low epidermal melanin content (but in practice basically just means WASPs supplemented with the Italians and Irish). But Ignatiev’s idea of an unspoken social contract among the white elite and the white working class that bestows “social privileges and a whole series of privileges befitting your white skin” is essentially identical to the modern conception of “white privilege”. In fact, the modern concept of “white privilege” is somewhat of a vestigial concept - it has been lifted from its long forgotten original context (that of corrupt and prejudiced labor union bosses who bestowed special privileges to the white working class) and has been generalized to apply to all of society. This is why it barely makes sense in the 21st century, and why even in the late 1980s, Peggy McIntosh had to repurpose the concept of “white privilege” to apply to much more subtle or debatable social privileges, such as the “privilege” of seeing your skin color represented more often on television.
Ignatiev continues:
Thus, while the ordinary white workers are severely exploited, they are also privileged. White supremacy is a deal between the exploiters and a part of the exploited, at the expense of the rest of the exploited - in fact, the original sweet-heart agreement!
Note here that Ignatiev has essentially laid the foundation for the modern concept of “white privilege” as something enjoyed by all whites - even the poorest whites - over all other races. Ignatiev’s conception of “white privilege” as a social advantage given to white workers via a tacit arrangement with prejudiced labor union bosses only makes sense within the context of the 1960s. In the 21st century, there is no coherent answer to the question “how is a poor white working class individual significantly more privileged than a poor black working class individual?” This is why "white privilege" is essentially a vestigial concept poorly repurposed for the 21st century.
The next part of Ignatiev's argument is quite anachronistic, but it introduces the idea of “white supremacy” as a systemic effect, rather than conscious racial bias. He writes:
Some may argue that [white-skin privilege] can't be called a deal, since most of those participating on either side are not conscious of where they fit in, that it is more accurate to consider white supremacy as the simple and determined result of the operation of certain blind laws, as something institutionalized, beyond the control, right now, of any sector of the people involved in its workings.
The “institutionalized”, “blind laws” that Ignatiev mentions fit the modern definition of “white supremacy” as a component of systemic racism. Ironically, Ignatiev actually argues against this idea, believing instead that white supremacist thinking is a conscious decision by corrupt or racist labor union bosses. Ignatiev writes:
Those who argue thus should consider the following question: if the bosses are always screaming about high labor costs, why don't they simply hire the cheapest labor there is, namely black and brown labor? The reason is that, for the bosses, the few cents an hour they would save in wages would be far outweighed by the growth in working class solidarity that would follow if all workers were on exactly the same footing.
Of course, this part of Ignatiev's argument is anachronistic and unconvincing. In the 21st century, the “bosses” do, in fact, hire lots of “black and brown” people for cheap labor. As someone reading these words over half a century after Ignatiev wrote them, the idea that a 1960s labor union boss potentially operating under directives from Cosa Nostra would really consider increased “working class solidarity” as a major threat seems like an enormous stretch. This seems to be a case of Ignatiev overestimating the extent to which normal people actually think in terms of Marxist doctrine. However, I can certainly believe that labor union bosses or the managerial class of the 1960s often avoided hiring non-white employees simply out of personal prejudice.
Regardless, despite his failure to predict things like cheap immigrant labor and outsourcing, Ignatiev seems to have mostly formulated the modern concepts of “white privilege” and “white supremacy” in this article. Ultimately, the anachronisms in his argument fail to really amount to anything significant, because Ignatiev arrives at the same conclusion as the modern social justice movement anyway:
White supremacy exists simply because sufficient numbers of white people, including white workers, have not been rallied to fight it - black people have never stopped fighting it. And the reason why white workers have not fought white supremacy, have in fact acquiesced in and cooperated with it, is that they enjoy their privileged status.
Ignatiev believes that, on average, working class whites are not inherently prejudiced against blacks, but that
… if there are not enough jobs to go around, then the great majority of white workers are willing to invoke their privilege and say ‘me first’, thus making them active partners in the exclusion and oppression of the black people. Under the system of private profit, all workers compete in the sale of their labor power; yet their general tendency is to unite. However, because the competition between black and white workers is not an equal one, but is weighted by the white-skin privilege, white workers have generally preferred to unite with the boss to maintain their privileges rather than unite with the black people to destroy all privilege.
And there we have it. The concept of “white privilege” was born in a forgotten leftist magazine as yet another excuse to explain why a Marxist prediction had failed to materialize. Class consciousness had not developed among white workers, and thus no revolution was forthcoming, because “white privilege” had created a division between white and black workers, leading white workers to adopt a “false consciousness” (in the Marxist sense) by valuing their white privilege.
Ignatiev then goes even further and claims that “white skin privilege” is, in fact, the reason that all labor movements, and thus attempts at socialist revolution, have historically failed in the United States. Ignatiev reasserts the crux of the problem: white privilege prevented white and black workers from organizing together and rebelling against the capitalist class. He writes:
In the final analysis the matter came down to this: the power structure was able to solve its problems with the white workers ‘within the family’, by offering them privileges. By accepting these privileges, the white workers turned their back not merely on their black brothers, but on the class struggle, and renounced their right to a say in their destiny. Of course the acceptance of privilege and the maintainance of white supremacy was not in the interest of either white or black workers! ... The ending of white supremacy does not pose the slightest peril to the real interests of the white workers, but to their fancied interests, their counterfeit interests, their white-skin privileges.
Ignatiev then returns to the present day (1968), and notes that the socialist workers movement is once again gaining momentum:
Once again the signs point to an upturn in the militancy of the American workers, including the whites. And once again the white workers will be faced with a choice: unite with the black people for our common interests, including the defeat of white supremacy and the repudiation of the white-skin privilege; or unite with the boss to maintain them. Solidarity between black and white requires more from the white than a willingness to ‘help the Negroes up if it doesn't lower us any.’ It requires a willingness to renounce our privileges, precisely to ‘lower ourselves’ in order that we can all rise up together.
And again, we have a very clear statement hear of the modern doctrine of white privilege, and the need to abolish white supremacy. Ignatiev now considers strategies going forward, and turns to specific tactics. He lays out a list of key tactics for the SDS and the socialist movement in general, including:
(1) In all our work we should bring the question of white supremacy to the fore. Thus in opposing the VietNam war, we should especially expose it as a racist, white supremacist war, an extension of US genocidal policies towards Indians and Afro-Americans.
Note that this first strategy is already based on a lie. The Vietnam war had very little to do with race. It was a failed attempt to limit the political influence of a rival white superpower.
(2) We should discover and take advantage of every opportunity to point out to white workers the nature of the white supremacist deal and show them how it operates against them by tying them to their enemy, the bosses.
…
(4) We should find and put forward slogans and issues which make concrete the repudiation of privilege, and which are tied in as closely as possible with building unity and winning real benefits.
Ignatiev concludes:
I don't claim to have the best tactical solutions to the problem I raise. But I do say that if all of us in the movement don't find ways to win the white workers to repudiate their white-skin privilege and oppose white supremacy, then we might as well, as one of the my friends says, “piss on the fire and summon the hounds”, because the hunt is over. At this point the main thing, in my opinion, is to create a wide-spread awareness among white working people of the nature of the white supremacist deal. ... The repudiation of the white-skin privilege is in the interests, both short and long range, of the white workers, and the only problem is to help them (and some of our radicals) see it.
Ignatiev believed that the elimination of “white skin privilege” was crucial to triggering a socialist revolution in America, and believed the New Left would need to adopt a strategy of emphasizing “white privilege”, pointing out racial disparities, and making white workers aware of the “white supremacist deal”. This new strategy would ultimately evolve into a complete embrace of “race consciousness” (or more generally, “identity consciousness”). In 1968, the left had not yet largely shifted away from an emphasis on class consciousness towards emphasizing race or identity consciousness - nor is it likely that the modern iteration of leftist identity politics was what Ignatiev or the New Left had in mind at the time when they made these first steps towards cultivating a racial consciousness in the fight against “white-skin privilege”. But the first tiny steps towards these concepts, and towards an emphasis on identity politics in general, began in 1968 when the New Left decided that “white skin privilege” was a big stumbling block for the revolution.
In 1970, the SDS dissolved. By the 1980s, the New Left was mostly defunct. But their ideology was passed on in classrooms across the nation, as many former SDS leaders held faculty or teaching positions across various Universities in the United States. Noel Ignatiev, the “father of white privilege”, joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer in the 1980s and became a full professor in 1995.16 In 2014, the term “white privilege” escaped the confines of obscure leftist magazines from the 1960s and the halls of academia, and penetrated mainstream pop culture.
In future posts, I will explore how the convergence of the New Left/SDS campus movement and the Black Power movement ultimately led to the hyper racial-sensitivity of the modern “woke” progressive left. I’ll explore how the creation of an Afro-American studies department at Yale in 1968 contributed to the race consciousness and racial separatism emphasized by progressives today, and I’ll also examine the seeds of “cancel culture” on Ivy League campuses in the late 1960s.
https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/29/4/44/1646277
Screen, Volume 29, Issue 4, Autumn 1988, Pages 44–65
Having white skin (low epidermal melanin content) is not the same as “whiteness” in the relevant literature; technically whiteness was originally WASPs, later supplemented by the Italians and Irish as they were assimilated. The social construct of “whiteness” merely refers to the dominant social group (originally the WASPs). In practice, this overlaps with Caucasians 99.99% of the time, so the distinction between “having white skin” and “whiteness” is really of academic interest only.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-108-subsaharan.html
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/educational-attainment/2019/cps-detailed-tables/table-1-3.xlsx
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/educational-attainment/2019/cps-detailed-tables/table-1-4.xlsx
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/educational-attainment/2019/cps-detailed-tables/table-1-5.xlsx
I’m specifically referring to the strain of 1980s/1990s Neo-Marxism that analyzes race relations within a Marxist framework. For an overview see:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254740139_Marxism_Racism_and_Ethnicity
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00726659/file/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.595808.pdf
In particular, while discussing Labour and Racism (1980), Robert Miles repeats Ignatiev’s argument: “… if there is any substance in Marxist theory, racism is inevitably seen as a barrier to the development of ‘a full class consciousness’, if we go back to the language of the time.”