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What’s in Your Invisible Knapsack?
By Najma Abdullahi, DEI Lead
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Health Services Management program, CCAPS, or the University of Minnesota.
Allow me to set the scene. I’m in my first postgraduate job in the healthcare field. On my way back from a lunch break, I decide to take a shortcut through a staff-only area I’ve passed through countless times before. Only this time, I suddenly hear a raised voice behind me telling me to stop. Then the voice gets much closer and says “Ma’am? Excuse me.” I turn around to see a colleague I recognize from around the building. However, she doesn’t seem to recognize me and looks ready to give me an ear-full before looking down at my employee badge, smiling, and saying “Oh, I thought you weren’t…”. At this point, she either trailed off or eventually finished her sentence. I don’t remember which because I turned around and kept walking before either could happen. I knew what she thought because this wasn’t the first nor was it the last time I was stopped in my workplace because someone thought I looked out of place.
Max J. Romano, MD, MPH, in his 2018 essay published in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) database titled “White Privilege in a White Coat: How Racism Shaped my Medical Education”, reflects on almost the exact opposite experience to mine stating “Even if I forget my identification badge, I can walk into the hospital and know that security guards will probably not stop me because of the color of my skin” (Romano, 2018). The above reflection was 1 of 17 catalog items Dr. Romano identified as just some of the contents in his “invisible knapsack” of privilege. The idea for this exercise comes from one of the most famous pieces of literature in the DEI space authored by Peggy McIntosh in 1989 titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
In the essay, McIntosh characterizes white privilege as a knapsack. She states “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious” (McIntosh, 1989). In an effort to acknowledge her own “invisible knapsack”, she set out to catalog the ways in which privilege appears in her life. As part of this process, she identified a list of 26 items which range from workplace instances to legal and medical examples. In all of them, she found evidence of privilege that never occurred to her until she wrote them down (McIntosh, 1989).
If this is your first time encountering McIntosh’s essay, I encourage you to engage with it and use her framework to take inventory of your own experiences to understand the invisible ways privilege operates in our lives. As Dr. Romano stated after completing his own “invisible knapsack” inventory, “Although systems of racial oppression take generations to dismantle, we must begin with awareness of the problem” (Romano, 2018). This reflection is also critical to us as healthcare professionals as we learn and understand how to advance DEI in healthcare delivery. We can only hope that this work will become easier one day, but until then, I invite you to ask yourselves “What’s in my invisible knapsack?”
Sources
McIntosh, Peggy. "White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack." (1989).
https://med.umn.edu/sites/med.umn.edu/files/2022-12/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf
Romano, Max J. "White privilege in a white coat: how racism shaped my medical education." The Annals of Family Medicine 16.3 (2018): 261-263.
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