The invisible knapsack

In 1988, American researcher Peggy McIntosh published a working paper at the Wellesley Centers for Women, reprinted in 1989 in Peace and Freedom magazine. In it, she compares white privilege to an invisible, weightless knapsack filled with maps, passports, codebooks and blank checks. Then she lists what she takes for granted: seeing people of her colour everywhere on television and on the front pages, knowing that her children's textbooks talk about people who look like them, never having to speak for her whole group, being sure that a police officer won't stop her because of her colour.

In Quebec, in 2017, Alexandra Pierre, a feminist activist and board member of the Ligue des droits et libertés, took up the idea in a lexicon on racism. She describes invisible but systematic advantages enjoyed by people perceived as white: being widely represented in positions of power, seeing their group's history valued, effortlessly finding children's books that reflect them, escaping arbitrary identity checks, feeling "normal" everywhere.

This privilege does not mean being rich or never having suffered: you can know poverty, illness or sexism. It means that the colour of your skin was not one more obstacle. Recognizing it is not a matter of guilt. In the spirit of Ubuntu, it is seeing the whole circle, then using your own ease to clear the way and amplify the voices we listen to too little.