The idea of “privilege”—that some people benefit from unearned, and
largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren’t
discriminatory —has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties,
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the “psychological wage” that enabled poor
whites to feel superior to poor blacks; during the civil-rights era,
activists talked about “white-skin privilege.” But the concept really
came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a
women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it.
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