Knapsack thoughts

Peggy White's article, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" was very insightful about the pervasiveness of unacknowleged, unearned advantages conferred on people with light skin. There were many passages that were thought-provoking. The one I chose to pull out that I agree with is that, "I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will" --rather than seeing myself as part of a larger system in which white privilege put me at an advantage. I agree with this quote personally in that this has been my own experience too, but I also chose this quote because this question of the individual vs. the "big systems" seems to keep coming up this week. In Sara's class, my vocab word was "mystification." This occurs when, due to uncritical but commonly held beliefs, people think a problem is caused by their own individual failure (e.g. can't get a good job b/c didn't work hard enough) when in fact it is a larger systemic problem (e.g. our economic system). As teachers, we are both working on a highly individual level and yet also part of a bigger system with some major problems. Part of me would still like to not have to deal with my participation in the bigger systems -- the scale is overwhelming. But White's article forces me to think about where I fit into the system and how, in the case of skin color, I benefit from it without even having realized how much.
The quote I have questions about is, "It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage...is kept strongly inculturated...so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy...Keeping most people unaware...serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already." I don't entirely disagree, but what I wanted to tease out is the underlying idea that some group of people in power are intentionally keeping the rest of us in the dark about white privilege. There is a little bit of conspiracy theory tone in there. Maybe I'm being too simple or naive but it seems to me it's more an issue of either (1) selfish unawareness - not paying attention if you're the beneficiary and (2) those in power being unapologetically open about their power and desire to keep it--they're not hiding white advantage, they're blatantly wallowing in it.
The "action" quote I chose is, "As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base. " Here we go back to the relationship between individual action and the larger picture. White talks about men or whites with power giving up some of their power. I think that most of the time, in daily interactions and situations such as the ones described in her list, being aware and "giving up some power" actually does not result in a true loss of power so much as a gain in humanity.