White Privilege - History of The Concept

History of The Concept

In his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “in black slavery and Reconstruction” could be found “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” Then, in 1965, drawing from that insight, and inspired by the Civil Rights movement, Theodore W. Allen began a forty-year analysis of “white skin privilege,” “”white race” privilege, and “white” privilege in a call he drafted for a “John Brown Commemoration Committee” that urged “White Americans who want government of the people” and “by the people” to “begin by first repudiating their white skin privileges.” The pamphlet, "White Blindspot," containing one essay by Allen one by Noel Ignatin (Noel Ignatiev) in the late 1960s focused on the struggle against "white skin privilege” and significantly influenced Students for a Democratic Society and sectors of the New Left. In 1974-1975 Allen extended his analysis to the colonial period with his ground-breaking "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" in 1974/1975, which ultimately grew into his seminal two-volume "The Invention of the White Race" in 1994 and 1997.

The term became more popular after Peggy McIntosh's 1987 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". McIntosh suggests that anti-racist white people need to understand how racial inequality includes benefits to them as well as disadvantages to others.

According to Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell and Stella M. Nkomo "most scholars of race relations embrace the use of white privilege". Sociologists in the American Mosaic Project report widespread belief in the United States that "prejudice and discrimination create a form of white privilege." According to their 2003 poll this view was affirmed by 59% of white respondents, 83% of Blacks, and 84% of Hispanics.