White Privilege and Education

White privilege has been defined by David Wellman as a system of advantage based on race. It has been compared by Peggy McIntosh to an invisible, weightless knapsack of assets and resources that she was given because she was born White in her time and place in U.S. society. Paula Rothenberg defines White privilege as the other side of discrimination, meaning the opposite of discrimination. This entry reviews the relationship of White privilege to educational access and outcomes in the United States and summarizes some of the work in White privilege being done in U.S. educational systems.

The idea of White privilege came into focus in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, after it had been implicit in many descriptions of race relations but had not been very clearly described as a phenomenon in its own right, carrying a host of unearned benefits and advantages for people defined as White. Whiteness is now understood by biologists as a social, not a biological, construct. It does have a strong bearing on how people will experience their lives within social systems. Privilege is not the only determinant in White people's well-being, but the unearned advantage that goes with White skin in U.S. culture does strongly affect life outcomes.

The topic of White skin privilege (usually Anglo-European ethnic privilege) is important for understanding the way education has developed in the United States. Education is seen by most U.S. citizens as a gateway to an economically stable adult life and to the fullest resources of the society. Within the world of education, research indicates that there are many areas in which people of color are struggling. Recent explanations of their difficulties, from the time of the civil rights movement onward, have included the idea that race discrimination has kept people of color down, or kept them marginal to U.S. culture, including the culture of the schools and universities. The White privilege analysis developed in the 1980s adds a different perspective to this one. While discrimination in education and society has indeed made the lives of people of color difficult, White privilege has made the lives of Whites correspondingly easier.

Peggy McIntosh has posited a horizontal line of hypothetical social justice. Below it, through forces of circumstances beyond their control, individuals or groups in education are pushed down, doubted, victimized, ignored, dehumanized, and underrated. Above it, through forces of circumstances beyond their control, some individuals or groups in education are pushed up, aided, given the benefit of the doubt, encouraged, believed in, exempted, and made to feel entitled to power. Within education, the history of this discrepancy [Page 2301]between being disadvantaged and being advantaged on racial grounds is very long, dating back to the taking of lands from Native Americans and the attempt to wipe out their cultures, if not themselves, and to the times of chattel slavery when it was illegal in some states even to teach a slave to read. The corresponding situation for White people, with expanding ownership of land and access to power over the centuries, was that they were encouraged to engage in education, learn the ropes, and to create the curricula, teaching methods, and cultures of schools and universities—all the while moving toward the desired outcomes in life that they themselves defined. Horace Mann's call for free, compulsory public education for both boys and girls was really a call for White children's education. When public education actually became available for people of African, Asian, Native, or Latin descent, they were already at a long-term disadvantage, while Whites were at a corresponding advantage in the public school system that they had created and that supported their ways of seeing. Education as Whites created and experienced it for centuries in the United States felt normal, and in fact positive, to those who benefited most from it. Those who benefit most from a privilege system are usually unaware that the privilege system exists.

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