Johnson PPD chap 2

In chapter two, Privilege, Oppression and Difference, of Alan Johnson’s book “Power, Privilege and Difference” the thesis is that fear disallows us to see what is really going on with privilege and power distribution. This chapter focuses mainly on the fact that people are privileged and those who are, have power over those who don’t.

Everyone is different and culturally we are afraid of the different, but this fear is learned, not inherited. Johnson gives us the “diversity wheel” so we can “map” out we are as individuals, and asks us to think about; what if we are straight and woke up gay the next day? How would that change how other people see you? Diversity is a good thing, but the trouble with it is that our world uses peoples’ differences against them. And those differences we see, on the outside, automatically places that person into a category. For instance when you see a man in a wheelchair, we automatically place him into the disabled category and therefore he must be incompetent and need help with everything in his daily life. The man in the wheelchair is what he becomes; no matter if he has a Ph D. in medicine he is still that man in a wheelchair. Thoughts like this, about the man in the wheelchair, or any other person with any disability for that matter, are all constructed in society. Just as society told us to make the man in the wheelchair inferior to and able-bodied man, society created that word, disabled. The word “disabled” is now significant and when we look at the man in the wheelchair that is all we see.

Now what is even more significant is if the man in the chair is black or white. If the man in the wheelchair is white he has privilege over the comparable black man in the same situation. Obviously the white man doesn’t feel privileged over the black man but the white man is treated better in society. Society sees the disabled as incompetent but in the black vs. white situation, the white man is treated as less incompetent. The white man is taking part in the “luxury of obliviousness,” he doesn’t realize that he has privilege in the situation. Continuing with “race,” white people have many privileges over everyone else in the world and it boils down to economics. The author Alan Johnson has taken information from the US census and according to that “the average white household has more than 14 times the net wealth of the average black household.” This makes it easier for white people to get a good education, health care and even housing. The privilege that whites get over blacks, men over women, heterosexual over homosexuals and the non-disabled over the disabled is a social system. This system places people into a category depending on their race, sex, orientation, and their abilities; and depending on what category your in is how you get treated. Culturally because the white man is privileged he must be happy, but that isn’t always true. Just knowing that he is privileged may make him unhappy, because he knows that others are suffering because of his privilege. Of course with every privilege there is oppression.

Johnson does pose a very good and mostly true argument, however in today’s world “white” people are not as privileged as the reading says. Privilege is basically given to the majority, which used to be white males but now as America’s melting pot grows there are more and more people who were once considered minorities, becoming the majority. With new races becoming the majority it is going to be very hard to give the white majority privilege. You can see this happening just by watching television. We have a black man and a woman running for President of the United States. More and more of a variety of ethnicities are filling political roles and they are the most privileged people in the world.

I enjoyed the reading it was very interesting. Privilege is something we all know about but never think about and it was nice to get a small reality check on the matter.