White Privilege

White privilege refers the largely unacknowledged and unearned advantages conferred on Caucasian people in the United States at the expense of people of color. White privilege benefits are socially, politically, and economically embedded at the systemic level and internalized at the psychological and interpersonal levels, particularly by Caucasian people (i.e., members of the dominant group). Therefore, Caucasians are resistant to efforts to recognize and ameliorate the causes and effects of the racial hierarchy that maintains these benefits.

At the systemic level, the advantages that Caucasian individuals enjoy include smaller class sizes in the elementary and secondary schools they attend, access to computer technology at home and at school, graduation from four-year colleges and universities, higher salaries, continued employment during economic downturns, access to home ownership and health insurance, and less stringent sentences for criminal offenses.

These manifestations of systemic White privilege are enabled and perpetuated at the psychological and interpersonal levels by the dominant and ethnocentric values of European Americans, conscious and unconscious beliefs in the superiority of Caucasian cultural norms over others, a sense of entitlement to resources, and the power to impose standards that continue to benefit Caucasian people and oppress people of color. Furthermore, the concept of White privilege includes not only a belief in the myth of meritocracy—that democratic choice and opportunity are equally available to all Americans regardless of race—but also an automatic tendency to be surprised by or discount evidence to the contrary. Most Caucasian Americans have been socialized to believe that their educational, financial, and social success is attributed solely to their own efforts and ability (i.e., merit); however, they fail to recognize the uneven playing field of advantage (i.e., their own White privilege) that they take for granted.

Peg McIntosh has identified many examples of the White privilege of daily experience that are outside the awareness of Caucasian people yet contrast perniciously with the daily microaggressions that are unavoidably experienced by people of color. Among these examples, McIntosh noted that Caucasian people take for granted the following advantages:

• They can arrange to be in the company of people of their own race most of the time.
• They can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to their race.
• They are never asked to speak for all the people of their racial group.
• They can usually go shopping alone without being followed or harassed by store clerks or security staff.
• If they should need to move, they can likely expect to be able to rent or purchase affordable and desirable housing.
• They can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers suspect that they got the job because of race.
• They are told about their heritage, which is deemed “civilization,” and shown that people of their color made it what it is.
• They can be sure that their children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

[Page 472]From the humanistic, social justice, and multicultural competency perspectives, White privilege does harm to people of color. From an economic standpoint, White privilege limits the human capital resources available to U.S. society. White privilege has negative psychological consequences for Caucasian people by virtue of their collusion, intentional and conscious or not, in subordinating diverse others. White privilege likely reduces the ability of multicultural counseling professionals to accurately perceive or process cognitive information on racial oppression experienced by clients of color.

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