I inherited my pet parakeet from a graduated med student.  The bird (“Hippo”) was named after Hippocrates—the “Father of Medicine”, and to avoid any type of identity-crisis I decided to let the name stick.  Yet, after Googleing “Parakeet, male or female?”, I discovered that my bird “Hippo” is a female, who just happened to be named after an old Greek guy.  It then came to me that the “Father of Medicine” was probably a “Mother”. When I tell people this, they usually think I’m cracking some sort of joke.  But no, I mean it.  The Father of Medicine was a Mother, and so was the “Father” of Philosophy, Psychology, Geometry, Playwriting, Genetics, and so forth…  Just because women don’t make it into history books, we learn and assume that women have not been making history.  

I was reminded of this last Tuesday while attending Dr. Peggy McIntosh’s lecture (Seeing Power Plurally).  If you’ve taken a Race & Ethnicity or Gender Studies class at U-M, chances are you have read McIntosh’s work “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”.  McIntosh told the audience how she came to realize her white skin privilege.  Of one of the forty-one white skin privileges she listed, McIntosh wrote “I can be pretty sure that I will find a publisher for this piece on ‘White Privilege’”.  Indeed, McIntosh did find willing and eager publishers.  Yet, it took her a few years to find a publisher that would agree to her condition that her article be published next to one authored by a women of color.  Publishers told her that they did not have any room for any more articles, or that they did not want to lower the overall quality of their journal.  Thus, when McIntosh’s “White Privilege” was able to be published in a journal that featured at least one woman of color’s perspective, the term “White Privilege” had already been coined, and not surprisingly by a White man.  Thus, according to the books, white race theory was first forwarded by a White man.  My point here is not so much that McIntosh got cheated.  She did what she should’ve done because white skin privilege was, let’s face it, well understood by women of color before 1965—before McIntosh published “White Privilege” and before Ted Allen published “The Invention of the White Race”.

We are taught that all “founders” are fathers, but I ask that we sensibly challenge that claim with a level of skepticism because He might well have been a Mother or a Sister.