What's colour got to do with it? A psychometric assessment of Peggy McIntosh's white privilege

Abstract

Peggy McIntosh's (White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies, Working Paper 189, Wellesley Center for Research on Women, 1988) list of 50 racial privileges, which purportedly benefit persons of white skin colour, has had enormous impact on social science research and educational curriculum and pedagogy. Surprisingly, to date, no attempt has been made to empirically explore the validity and reliability of her list of racial privileges. To address this issue, we conducted a psychometric analysis on McIntosh's list of racial privileges with 204 adult Australian university students. Using a combination of factor analyses and Rasch modelling on McIntosh's list of racial privileges we identified a 27-item multidimensional scale consisting of three well-functioning and reliable subscales (i.e. a 15-item Racial Representation, a six-item Social Interaction and a six-item Culture and Politics subscale). Moreover, the derived multi-dimensional white privilege instrument was found to have good criterion validity in that persons’ experiences of racism significantly predicted white privilege (i.e. the more racism experienced the less white privilege experienced and vice versa). Finally, analysis of variance comparisons indicated that persons with white skin colour had significantly more white privilege than persons with black skin colour and Asians, while Asians had more white privilege than persons with black skin colour. Overall, this study presents evidence of a psychometrically valid and reliable 27-item multi-dimensional white privilege instrument and lends empirical support to the theoretical underpinnings of McIntosh's contentions.