Founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity & Diversity) Director of the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute Peggy McIntosh (born November 7, 1934) is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist of the Wellesley Centers for Women.
McIntosh encourages individuals to reflect on and recognize their own unearned advantages and disadvantages as parts of immense and overlapping systems of power.
[5] In 1986, she founded the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, which became the largest peer-led professional development project for educators in the United States, helping faculty to create curricula, teaching methods, and classroom climates that are multicultural, gender-fair, and inclusive of all students regardless of their backgrounds.
[7] She directs the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project, which provides workshops on privilege systems, feelings of fraudulence, and diversifying workplaces, curricula, and teaching methods.
[8] McIntosh was featured in Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible,[9] a documentary film produced by World Trust, revealing "what is often required [of people] to move through the stages of denial, defensiveness, guilt, fear, and shame into making a solid commitment to ending racial injustice.
"[10] As a speaker, McIntosh has presented or co-presented at over 1,500 private and public institutions and organizations, including 26 campuses located in Asia.
McIntosh used the metaphor of white privilege as "an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks".
[11]: 2 In her original 1988 essay, McIntosh listed forty-six of her own everyday advantages, such as "I can go shopping most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed"; "I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race"; and "If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.
"[11]: 3 McIntosh has stated that in order to study systems of advantage and disadvantage as they impact individuals, "Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one's place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents' places of origin, or your parents' relationship to education, to money, or to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background.
Monthly peer-led SEED seminars are designed as round-table testimonies about teachers' past and present experiences in life and in schooling.
This is a teaching technique McIntosh coined as Serial Testimony, which she developed after realizing that systems of power had taught her to ignore or downplay the experiences of others in order to elevate herself in society.
McIntosh has received four honorary degrees, as well as being the recipient of the Klingenstein Award for Distinguished Educational Leadership from Columbia Teachers College.