Apple Sues Samsung In Germany Again
New submitter tguyton writes "Apple is going after Samsung again in Germany, this time over 10 phones including the Galaxy S II. It should come before the courts in August, a month before their tablet case in September."
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
By Peggy McIntosh
This article is now considered a `classic' by anti-racist educators. It has been used in workshops and
classes throughout the United States and Canada for many years. While people of color have described
for years how whites benefit from unearned privileges, this is one of the first articles written by a white
person on the topics.
It is suggested that participants read the article and discuss it. Participants can then write a list
of additional ways in which whites are privileged in their own school and community setting. Or
participants can be asked to keep a diary for the following week of white privilege that they notice (and in
some cases challenge) in their daily lives. These can be shared and discussed the following week.
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. 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. Denials, which
amount to taboos, surround the subject of advantages, which men gain from women's disadvantages.
These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since
hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege,
which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about
racism as something which 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. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white
privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can
count on cashing in each day, but about which I was `meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is
like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes,
tools and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to
reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white
privilege must ask, " Having described it what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges
from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why
we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways
in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged
person or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral
state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth
Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow
"them" to be more like "us."
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white
privilege on my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to
skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical loca
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."