Thanks; Don't Mention It

Which is more important--coming to terms with white privilege or male privilege?


Thank you.


Yes, that's why I asked.

So, yes, this is about Hillary and about Hillary-hating and about the unbearable swiftness of vitriol in the service of invisible all-pervasive misogyny.

But, you know, it's  really the systemic thing that needs to be addressed.
  How scary  might that be?

 "After I realized,  the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. . . .

Through work to bring materials and perspectives from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged in the curriculum, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. 
Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon with a life of its own, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected, but alive and real in its effects. 
As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. 

P. McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege"