Race culture and identity

Peggy McIntosh uses various rhetorical strategies in her essay in order to persuade her readers to agree with her about her claims on racism and white privilege. Peggy McIntosh does this by using ethos, logos, and pathos to appeal to her audience to accept her claims which slowly evolve the thesis of the essay. In this essay, Peggy claims that gender, race, and cultural discrimination are as a result of the accumulation of unseen privileges. Peggy McIntosh observes men’s attitude towards their privileges and their unwillingness to give up some of their rights for women, even as they agree that women are underprivileged. In order to demonstrate that white privileges and male privileges are alike because whites know that they have more power than other races but they are unwilling to relinquish their privileges for other races, “I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance” (16).

However, in explaining this, it is evident from the quotation that Peggy complicates the discussion when she reveals that there exists a flaw in the privileges. She even confuses herself when differentiating the meaning of earned strength from unearned power. By grouping the privileges into two groups; desirable and non-desirable, Peggy shows how white privileges are more complicated instead of being taken as advantages. Peggy redefines the word privilege and posits that it is a blend of natural entitlements and acts of forced domination. For readers, this definition makes more sense and reasonable which makes her win in persuading them to accept her claims. Although it is difficult to separate this principle from the intersection of other privileges, the advantage of whites portraying such confident actions is still evident.

McIntosh’s thesis is based on personal experiences of the racial groupings, and this has allowed her to address the elements which other ethnic groupings would not have known. From this analogy, the traditional perception that those with the understanding of their racial identity would make them advantageous over other gatherings has shifted for the better because by understanding the causes of whiteness advantage, and it is possible to mitigate racism at its basic level. McIntosh implies that the intersection of race with other factors of whiteness advantage requires due consideration. In her statement, McIntosh agrees that it is not easy to fully establish the interaction of racial identity together with other elements which discuss privileges of one race over the other especially when the dominant race have identified their advantages over the other races.