White Privilege

The reading segment that I found most interesting was White Privilege and Male Privilege by McIntosh. The main reason for my interest is because I am a white woman living in the United States and have never really noticed the amount of privileges I have for being white. However, from reading this it made me notice that I show more fear of being white than a woman of color. Growing up in a predominantly white community, it sort of gave me a prejudice about colored males, not so much women. Even now at almost 20 years old, I get scared if it is dark and a colored man is walking around me alone. It sounds racist, but it is just how I have grown up and I don’t think it is racist at all, or that it is my fault. I think that being white and seen with all of these privileges is more of a disadvantage than anything else. It has been this way in society that white people are the privileged people, for a very long time, and it has given colored people a negative view about whites. A couple examples from the book that would make this apparent are the points from the list that McIntosh made. Number 23, “I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.” I think that colored people see our government in a very negative way because of how we portray things, especially in the media. The Arab culture is constantly being portrayed as a nasty, violent race because of everything going on in the war. Nothing is ever told about the bad things that Americans are doing in the war, only the colored people. Therefore, the Arab culture probably looks at the white people as crude and disrespectful because not all Arab people are involved in the war, yet they get treated like they are.