"White privilege" is one of these buzzword terms that serves the same role in social justice ideology as "original sin" serves in certain religious denominations: You are born with it, you cannot do anything about it, and you are a bad and horrible person because of it, even if you do good things and have never hurt anybody. Even if you try to redeem your sinful nature, and make amends, you'll still be sinful and wicked, for your entire life, and you deserve nothing but punishment and scorn, and there's nothing you can do about it. You are simply born wrong.
Where does this concept originate from? Rather unusually, we know exactly where it originates from, and who invented it. It's a relatively (and perhaps a bit surprisingly) old concept: It was invented by one Peggy McIntosh, a feminist academic, in 1988, in an article she wrote named "The Invisible Knapsack". This article is essentially part of the canon and Holy Gospel of modern social justice ideology. Part of the Holy Scriptures of the social justice religion.
The thing is, Peggy McIntosh was born and raised in extreme privilege, as part of the upper middle class. She grew up in a neighborhood which had a median income over four times that of the national average. She never saw nor experienced poverty or harsh conditions. All that she ever saw and experienced was a life of luxury and riches, where she never had to worry about anything.
What many people surmise is that since she has always lived in a very wealthy and privileged environment, ever seeing and interacting with a very small group of people (compared to the entirety of the country), and the vast majority of these other people were white, she came to the conclusion that correlation implies causation: In other words, because all the rich people she ever saw and interacted with were white, she came to the conclusion that all white people are privileged.
This is essentially just extrapolating from a very small sample. She never had to live in nor experience any majority-white neighborhood that was very poor and in horrible conditions, and thus she came to the conclusion that they don't exist. What she did is confuse classism (the difference between the lives of subgroups in society based on economic class) with racism, simply because in her environment the majority of people happened to be of a particular race.
Where does this concept originate from? Rather unusually, we know exactly where it originates from, and who invented it. It's a relatively (and perhaps a bit surprisingly) old concept: It was invented by one Peggy McIntosh, a feminist academic, in 1988, in an article she wrote named "The Invisible Knapsack". This article is essentially part of the canon and Holy Gospel of modern social justice ideology. Part of the Holy Scriptures of the social justice religion.
The thing is, Peggy McIntosh was born and raised in extreme privilege, as part of the upper middle class. She grew up in a neighborhood which had a median income over four times that of the national average. She never saw nor experienced poverty or harsh conditions. All that she ever saw and experienced was a life of luxury and riches, where she never had to worry about anything.
What many people surmise is that since she has always lived in a very wealthy and privileged environment, ever seeing and interacting with a very small group of people (compared to the entirety of the country), and the vast majority of these other people were white, she came to the conclusion that correlation implies causation: In other words, because all the rich people she ever saw and interacted with were white, she came to the conclusion that all white people are privileged.
This is essentially just extrapolating from a very small sample. She never had to live in nor experience any majority-white neighborhood that was very poor and in horrible conditions, and thus she came to the conclusion that they don't exist. What she did is confuse classism (the difference between the lives of subgroups in society based on economic class) with racism, simply because in her environment the majority of people happened to be of a particular race.
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