The idea of white privilege has been around in at least some form since Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America in which he said that whites received a psychological wage. Peggy McIntosh popularized the privilege discussion with her invisible knapsack, which purported to list experiences that white people shared. The privilege discussion is an important part of the activist repertoire, but has increasingly become a litmus test for in-group activists and out-group activists. Much of this is due to the inherent essentialism in the current privilege concept, which tends to get read as all whites have white privilege all the time. I would like to argue that privilege is not eternal or essential, but context dependent. It is spatialized. Let me explain.
When I go to a department store, I am not followed around or questioned about my intentions. My presence in the department store is deemed in place. This is not as simple as it sounds. The department store is a socially produced space, meaning that institutional, cultural, and economic aspects of that space exist that create the situation where I am deemed in place and a black person or another person of color may be deemed out of place. It's not just a racist security guard or store clerk, but the whole institutional, cultural, and economic milieu. The interaction between my identity and that space produces privilege.
However, I deliver papers for a local newspaper and my route takes me into Mountain Brook, an incredibly wealthy suburb of Birmingham. When I go into stores in that community, I am invisible, meaning that I am so out of place that no one even sees me. Why is this? It's because the working class part of my identity interacts with the space in Mountain Brook in a way that oppresses me.
We should see white supremacy (and other forms of oppression) as a set of practices that produce and reinforce contexts or spaces in a more or less automatic way, but also that those practices are place dependent. Thus, instead of seeing white privilege as a universal for all whites and oppression as a universal for all people of color, we need to read social contexts to understand how those contexts or spaces interact with identities to produce privilege or oppression, and since all identities are multiple and sometimes people are oppressed and privileged at the same time, depending on the context and scale, it eliminates essentialism and creates and analytical tool that can better help us to understand how systems and practices of oppression and privilege work in a given context or space.
