Privilege, Oppression, and Difference Blog

The main idea of this chapter of Allan Johnson’s novel is to explain the relationships among privilege, oppression, and difference. More specifically, that it’s the power and privilege that perpetuate the cycle and that people who really are given privilege usually don’t see their situation as such.
First Johnson explains that it is the fear of making other groups uncomfortable, especially the dominant group, that keeps the less privileged from looking at the world with a serious degree of reality. However, as we’ve been discussing in class, the mere fact that humans have distinct physical differences is not the reason a divide in privilege exists; it is because, as humans, we don’t really understand each other. And in an attempt to place everyone into perfectly divided categories, we have formed generalizations about groups. These generalizations are often times negative and that causes us to fear or avoid people of those groups, if for no other reason than that they may exhibit those negative behaviors. Next, Johnson challenges us to define ourselves in specific groups, which is often difficult to do, but we define others using the same categories. Then he defines privilege and explains McIntosh’s two types of privilege; the first based on “unearned entitlements” which are things people should have and “unearned advantage” which are awarded to individuals who have done nothing to deserve it (22-23); the second is called “conferred dominance” which gives a dominant group allotted power over another (23). In order to make privilege seem more real to people who don’t experience the oppressive side of it, Johnson gives us many examples of privilege that people receive. To wrap up his chapter Johnson explores how members of privileged groups rarely see themselves as privileged. This is due to the fact that those members rarely compare their achievements to those of different groups (white men compare themselves to the other white men around them) and that privilege doesn’t necessarily make a person feel “privileged” or happy.
So, what if racial, gender, sexual, and capability privilege didn’t exist? How would the world operate? In that utopia, would people feel that they were equal to everyone else? A world of perfect equality will never exist, but a world without privilege based on specific, unchangeable characteristics may. Privilege based on choices we make will always exist. For example, isn’t a multi-millionaire treated to certain privileges that no common man OR woman is. We’ve all seen on TV the free gifts that the rich are given just because they are rich. Gifts that they could easily afford with their vast affluence and yet they are simply rewarded it. It may not seem fair or just to you and I, but do those people deserve those things for their “hard work”. What did Paris Hilton ever do to deserve her fame?
This reading was very engaging and forced me to look at myself in ways that I had not before. I admit that I’ve been guilty of feeling rather “unprivileged” due to privileges that I’m supposed to have been born with. Yet, if you just admit that those privileges exist, you can see that you wouldn’t be where you are today without having taken advantage of them. It’s quite the moral dilemma, but what makes it all even harder is that it’s hard to tell when something is given to you through privilege and what you have actually earned on your own.