White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Peggy McIntosh writes about the advantages of having white skin, whether it is financial, personal, or physical. She begins to write about the benefits men have over women as far as status in society, work possibilities, and others. She is obviously a feminist writer and that was reflected in her first two paragraphs. Then Peggy writes about white privileges and how we carry an "invisible wieghtless knapsack." At this part I am kind of lose interest from the story because of the the one sided observation and I don't like her writing style. As the paper continues there is a long list of random observations that she finds beneficial to white people that continues consist of 50 different statements. This seem like overkill to me, however I read some of these and I can agree with some like "48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household." However many of these statements seemed outdated and irrelevant like "41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me."

I did not find this article very convincing unless you were a white women. The article stuck with the thesis and went off on a few tangents during the paper. The beginning seemed to close out some of the audience of the paper. This paper shows heavy emphasis on the ethos side of society and stays with that throughout the paper. There are a few portion where logos is presented offering examples of the paper, but I found this paper not convincing enough and the tone seemed very snobby.