What’s in your invisible backpack?
The Invisible Backpack is an analogy originally developed by anti-racism activist Peggy McIntosh. Members of a majority culture, like straight white men like me, benefit in many ways from the privileges that accrue to them. This kind of privilege becomes so pervasive that it feels normal, and in fact doesn’t feel like anything at all. This is dangerous because it can lead us to believe that racism, sexism, and other exclusionary -isms either don’t exist at all or are not that big a deal. The glib response of a white person saying “All Lives Matter” to a black person saying “Black Lives Matter” is an example of how the invisible impacts of privilege can cause us to perpetuate systematic racism.
