These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s disadvantages. They may say they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Through work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group. These articles may not be electronically posted except by the National SEED Project. McIntosh's lists must not be taken out of their autobiographical contexts. 10-12, a publication of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Philadelphia, PA.įor use in a bound volume there will be a copyright fee. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" first appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989, pp. White privilege cultural neuropsychology culture diversity inclusion race/ethnicity universalism.White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Invisible knapsack professional#
To ensure future clinical utility and professional viability, it is imperative that neuropsychology as a field, and particularly the non-Hispanic White majority of its membership and organizational leaders, unpack its invisible knapsack of privilege and acknowledge the ways in which such privilege can insidiously compromise individual and systemic responses to the ongoing crisis of insufficient workforce characteristics, psychometric tools, and empirical research basis to address increasing patient diversity and neuropsychological health care disparities. The present examination suggests that white privilege within the field of neuropsychology may perpetuate health care disparities relevant to practice and research and the field's insufficient systemic response to its longstanding challenges related to workforce demographics and psychometric instrumentation.
Utilizing McIntosh's paradigm of "unpacking the invisible knapsack of white privilege," this author (a non-Hispanic White, Spanish-English bilingual man) conducted an idiographic, qualitative examination of ways in which non-Hispanic White neuropsychologists may experience unearned and largely invisible (unexamined) privilege. This commentary describes a qualitative examination of white privilege in neuropsychology, its implications for the field, and recommendations to move forward. This disconnect threatens the future clinical utility and professional viability of the field, and may at least in part be related to white privilege. A persistent and growing challenge to the field of neuropsychology is the disconnect between: (a) the increasingly culturally/linguistically diverse populations in need of clinical and research evaluations and (b) a neuropsychology workforce and 'toolkit' of validated instruments and norms that remain generally ill-prepared to address these needs.