Category: white privilege

Liabilities of White Privilege –How White Privilege Hurts White People and How We Regain Our Humanity

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Book Release – Coming in April

Michelle Chalmers, MSW

Liabilities of Whiteness: How Whiteness Hurts White People and How We Can Regain Our Humanity is a clear-eyed, uncompromising examination of whiteness as a system not an identity and the profound ways it damages those who live inside it.

Drawing from lived experience, historical analysis, and years of antiracist education work, Michelle Chalmers identifies 21 specific liabilities of whiteness: from entitlement and denial, to emotional numbing, disconnection, false innocence, and the erosion of empathy. These harms are not accidental. They are structural, intentional, and necessary for the maintenance of racial hierarchy.

This book challenges the dominant framing of whiteness as a “privilege” alone and instead asks a deeper question: What has whiteness cost us? What parts of our humanity, capacity for truth, relationship, belonging, accountability, and love have been sacrificed to uphold it?

Structured for both individual reflection and collective use, each chapter includes guided questions, practices, and calls to action designed to support readers in moving beyond guilt or defensiveness toward responsibility, repair, and sustained engagement.

Liabilities of Whiteness is not a book about becoming a “better” white person.

It is a book about becoming human again and understanding why the dismantling of whiteness is essential not only for justice, but for our shared survival.

Email Michelle@michellechalmers.com for more details and pre-order

Visit my YOUTUBE Channel @liabilitiesofwhiteness https://youtube.com/@liabilitiesofwhiteness?si=QZ-atubFKJ6CD0y2

Liabilities of White Privilege –How White Privilege Hurts White People

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Completely Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack:

How White Privilege Hurts White People 

  Michelle Chalmers, MSW

            In 1988-89, Peggy McIntosh published two papers on white privilege, the shorter of which is called “White Privilege:  Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In it she listed many ways in which she benefits from a system of “unearned assets” she has as a white woman in a society that favors whites and gives them unearned advantages. She compared white privilege to “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” As far as she could see her colleagues of color did not have these unearned assets.

I am a white woman who has looked deeper into my knapsack and I invite you to do the same. What I have come to see, is in addition to the seemingly endless list of advantages and benefits of white privilege are all the harmful disadvantages that white privilege empties onto me as a white person. These disadvantages are the unearned liabilities of white privilege, on white people. Unearned liabilities are the societal and cultural disadvantages that put white people in a state of blurred reality, separateness, and deep internal damage to our humanity, which in turn affects all the rest of humanity. I hope you’re ready to dive deeper into the concept of white privilege and examine it for the harm it does to the people who have it, and enable us white people to see it is something we need to work against.

Some Liabilities of White Privilege –How White Privilege Hurts White People

  • White privilege racializes us to believe we are superior
  • tells us we are entitled and deserving
  • makes us believe things that are not real
  • allows us to deny things that are real
  • allows us to deny peoples lived reality
  • restricts us from really understanding the world of which we believe we are an exceptional part
  • tricks us into thinking the playing field is level
  • justifies us living in a false reality
  • allows us to be mediocre
  • hinders our ability to feel compassion and empathy for all humans
  • limits our ability to create equity
  • limits our ability to ask the question…. why?
  • restricts our ability to see and be comfortable with all of humanity
  • limits our ability to understand parts of our own identity
  • keeps us from seeing human differences as an amazing gift
  • closes us off from seeing people who are different as equally human
  • limits us in choosing the truest friend and true love
  • limits our awareness of how people really feel or what they think
  • deceives us into seeing beauty in only some places
  • limits our ability to have a true connection to many people of color
  • limits our ability to see the true contributions of people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people
  • controls our judgment
  • allows us to rationalize injustice
  • stops us from working to create change in systems that are unjust and inequitable
  • has confined us to communities who are also hurting from all these same things
  • White privilege expects to have the same affect on white children

* Copyright 1989, Peggy McIntosh. Peace and Freedom magazine, July-August 1989, pp. 10-12. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Phila, PA.

Thank you to Peggy McIntosh for your wisdom and grace.