White Privilege The Invisible Knapsack Analysis

In Peggy McIntosh’s’ essay, “White Privileges: The Invisible Knapsack”, she uses numerous diverse rhetorical strategies to persuade and engage her readers attention toward the claims she states about white privilege and racism. The essay points out that males and white people from birth have certain privileges, earned strengths, and unearned power. The author made good use of ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade her readers to understand and accept her claims about white privilege, and these claims she specifically stated, gradually expanded her thesis throughout her essay. McIntosh’s purpose in her essay is to identify the “invisible systems” that we have of male and white privilege in order to educate the public and readers about the masked favoritism or inequality to reestablish it. In the beginning of her essay, McIntosh states her observations about men’s attitudes towards their own privileges, and their “unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged” (Pg. 536) although they

537). This list allows the readers to be placed in the mindset of the author because the list encompasses social, emotional, mental and physical aspects of privileged life that many other people may not have heard of or thought about before. A majority of the readers may be able to relate to some of these incidents among white people because there is only a limited amount of experiences stated that maybe one individual is able to see outside of these occurrences and relate it to one of their own. The list McIntosh had evaluated employs logos because it becomes a list, it is directly written down as the readers can extend the version with their own situations they have encountered as being a privileged white American; all of these listings becomes more evidence for her