First Essay (E1): A Personal Reflective-Analysis Essay Concerning How (some of) Your Life Experiences are Informed by or Reflect Privilege(s) or Lack Thereof
Purpose
After reading Peggy McIntosh’s essay entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (find it lower in this module), write a three- to five-page essay (the essay’s Works Cited is not included in the page count) that reflects on your experience of privilege, whether concerning race, gender, or heterosexual privilege. The essay need not be definitive; it may just reflect on and analyze one type of privilege. For that matter, it’s better to focus on just one aspect of privilege in depth than to treat all three superficially. The goal of the essay is to teach readers what privilege is and how it operates in the US, using your experiences as evidence to demonstrate claims concerning privilege.
Outcomes: knowledge, skills, and abilities
By writing this essay, you will:
- Meet several of the course Outcomes, including reading analytically and thinking critically; composing and revising in context; and evaluating an essay rhetorically (see the course Syllabus for further explanation of these Outcomes);
- Recognize that there is no right answer here, that essay content will be particular to and unique as its writer;
- Learn what constitutes a good thesis, which conventionally should be stated as the final or concluding sentence of the introductory paragraph;
- Learn to write a thesis-driven essay that relies on developed TREE-style paragraphs to demonstrate its thesis;
- Learn how to format an essay in MLA style;
- Begin to understand that, no matter our positionalities (an aggregation of our various identities) and no matter whether we are antiracist or believe ourselves racially neutral, we are all implicated in and effected by systemic discrimination, which some of us are advantaged from while others are disadvantaged, depending on our positionalities.
Essay expectations
The essay is to be audience-aware, engaging readers, imploring them to want to read on, be interested not just in you but in the phenomena that is privilege, whether race, gender, or heterosexual privilege. Further, the essay will be particular to your experiences, representing you. So take a chance, risk. Perhaps try something different with this essay. Be creative. There are myriad ways to craft this essay, as many variations as there are types of people. After all, again, what will the essay represent? You. So how do you want to construct or represent your self to others, to readers?
Because privilege functions differently in different nations and cultures, the essay is to focus on your experiences of privilege in the US. However, if you’ve lived in a different country, then the essay may reflect on privilege in that culture early on, even though most of the essay should concern your experiences in the US.
Because the goal of the essay is to teach readers what privilege is and how it operates in the US, using your experiences as evidence to demonstrate claims concerning privilege, then privilege should lead, not your experiences as evidence, which means paragraph topic sentences are to state something concerning privilege that paragraphs will then demonstrate by drawing on your experiences as evidence. Hence, topic sentences should NOT be narrative based because narrative concerns experience, not concepts or ideas.
- There is only one way not to write the essay: in the five-paragraph formulaic style, which while perhaps sufficient for high school is an inadequate form for handling most college writing tasks and assignments. (To be clear, a five-paragraph formulaic essay will not score higher than a C for this assignment.)
- If the essay does not use first person point of view, “I,” it’s off topic. If the essay doesn’t discuss your specific experiences as related to privilege, it’s not fulfilling the assignment. Further, the essay should never use “you” and, to avoid generalizing, better be careful about using “we.”
- Contextualizing. A paragraph has to do more than just cite examples; it also has to contextualize examples. To contextualize means to discuss something in context. The context here is privilege, specifically privilege as defined by McIntosh. Hence, every paragraph but for the essay’s conclusion should be referring to or quoting from McIntosh to contextualize its example(s), to make clear to readers how some example is a matter of privilege. Also, don’t just drop quotations. A dropped quotation is just sitting there, doing nothing. When quoting–if not before then after–synthesize some quotation, which means both explaining what it means as well as how it contributes to the discussion that it’s embedded within.
- Quoting from and documenting a source. Because the essay will be quoting from a source (McIntosh), to avoid plagiarizing the essay also has to parenthetically cite the source in text (that is, in the essay) and document the source on a Works Cited. Parenthetical citation, which follows a summary or quotation, identifies the page number on which some idea or words appear in some article or source. If some article or source does not include page numbers—perhaps because it’s an online article—then parenthetical citation isn’t included because there’s no page number(s) to cite. Although McIntosh’s article does not include page numbers, we’re going to pretend that it does so that y’all can practice providing parenthetical citations, using outside sources responsibly and ethically. The McIntosh article is five pages total. So if you quote a line from the third page, for example, then provide a parenthetical citation of that page number—e.g., (3). Here’s an example of a line being quoted from McIntosh followed by parenthetical citation:
- According to Peggy McIntosh, “Many, perhaps most, […] white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see ‘whiteness’ as a racial identity” (4).
To document McIntosh and other canvas course materials on an essay’s Works Cited, refer to “How to cite course materials” (Rules for Writers 508-09), using a modification of the template provided there:
- Author last name, Author first name. “Essay or article title.” Course materials, Engl 101, Bellevue College, Winter 2025.
Replace the first two entries—author name and article title—with the appropriate data from some article being quoted, and be sure the source citation is formatted properly (more on quoting later this week). And don’t just copy and paste that template to your essay; if you do, the font will be faded. If the font is faded, then the essay will lose formatting points on the rubric for scoring the essay.
A writing process for completing the essay
The following is not definitive or absolute. It’s a suggested process or method (one I would use). Each writer needs to develop a writing process that is effective for them.
- Study the essay assignment to understand what is expected;
- Study—that is, read critically—the essay prompt, McIntosh’s essay, the article that will inform your essay;
- Use various invention strategies—e.g., clustering, freewriting, talking, etc.—to reflect on your experiences of privilege to conjure examples to support the essay’s thesis;
- Cluster or aggregate the various examples from your life experiences in some sensical scheme to determine how best to organize them in the various paragraphs that follow the introduction;
- Write the introduction, which should either: 1) just get right to the task at hand, introducing and then explaining what privilege is and how it functions or operates, then conclude by stating a thesis; or 2) provide a full-paragraph anecdote as example that reveals some aspect of privilege as it pertains to your life experience, while, again, concluding by stating a thesis (an anecdote is a personal example that is illustrated in detail to effect reader engagement and when possible elicit reader identification or care);
- Begin writing additional paragraphs, which are to comply with the TREE style: the first line of a paragraph is a topic sentence that states what the paragraph will demonstrate;
- After a rough draft is complete, then revise, edit, and polish the essay’s style (more on these processes later);
- Before sure the essay is formatted in MLA style (and includes a Works Cited);
- Lastly, before submitting the essay, review this assignment, the rubric for assessing the essay, and the document in the first week module entitled “Essay expectations” to ensure that the essay will achieve its purpose.