Through my research and examination of white privilege essay examples, IÂ’ve come to realize that to decide whether White privilege is useful as a concept, requires an understanding of the term. Kendall (2002) defines white privilege as an institutional (rather than personal) set of benefits granted to those of us who, by race, resemble the people who dominate the powerful positions in our institutions. This definition takes into account several aspects of white privilege which can help us determine its usefulness. White privilege is typically viewed as a progressive phenomenon as it explicitly acknowledges the unearned benefits granted to White people based on a hierarchy of racism, but arguably has only just sustained the racism. From my research, I have found a lack of positive response post-exposure to privilege, which begs the question, who is it useful for? On the one hand, the concept is useful for everyone to identify that there are wider structures responsible for racial inequalities in western
society. On the other hand, it is useless for white people, if used to make themselves appear self-reflective and egalitarian, without constructively reforming the structures that create and maintain the privilege. After all, the concept of white privilege was mentioned in earlier works from Black scholars such as W.E.B Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America (935), but only rose to the surface when a White person, Peggy McIntosh wrote about it in White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Womens Studies. This in itself is a privilege of white people to have a voice valued more than the voices of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, especially when it directly affects them the most. The fact that most of the popular works were written by White people, and will subsequently be discussed in my essay, is a perpetuation of this. The issue of positionality is crucial to the discourse of white privilege. I will explore these aspects in this essay.