White People Need to Listen

To the Editor:

I need to respond to Evan Kelly’s article on Peggy McIntosh and the panel on white privilege. Kelly wrote that Peggy McIntosh took “questions about her position as a white academic advocate for people of color.” 
This is an unfortunate way to characterize McIntosh. She, far from being a white advocate for people of color, was being an advocate for white people being accountable. The Review should have said that.
McIntosh attempted to get white people to see that we are standing on the heads and hearts of other people simply by accepting power and privilege that we have not earned.
She was eloquent in showing that when we leave white power unquestioned and entrenched, we take freedom away from other people and distort our own selves.
McIntosh embodies what it means to be a white person taking on a racist system. Her personal integrity and moral authority seem to matter more to her than simply accepting the invisible benefits of being white in a racist system.
The questions of the evening she helped create seemed to be: how do we dissent from the system? How do we live?
The other panel members, Adrian Bautista, Pam Brooks and Adrienne Lash-Jones, each spoke powerfully to us about their own experiences and using our own agency in different circumstances. They prompted us toward reflective actions. I wish more of what they said had been recorded in this newspaper.
Listening to the eloquence of the panel members, I was glad Peggy McIntosh was among them. Yet I wondered why Oberlin had to get a white professor from another school to speak about whiteness and racial justice. Nonetheless, I felt lucky to have been visiting Oberlin while such an event was taking place.
Peggy McIntosh is a significant white advocate for white people because she calls on us to be accountable and reflective. She is significant perhaps because she is so rare among white people. She stands as one of the very few exceptions to how white people usually are, for as Patricia Eakins notes: “To be ‘white’ means to be insensitive to the possibilities for oppression within one’s self, therefore out-of-touch for opportunistic reasons, with who one is and who others are.”

–Daniel H. Bush
OC ’99
New York City