Unraveling the Knot of Privilege, Power, and Difference

Allan G. Johnson, PhD

e are all living deep inside an oppressive legacy of social life organized around privilege, power, and difference. On some level, for example, most people know that gender is tied to a great deal of suffering and injustice, from discrimination and exclusion to violence and harassment to conflict between work and family roles. Millions of women are weary from the struggle simply to hang onto what's been gained, and many well-intentioned men do nothing because they can't see how to acknowledge what's going on without inviting guilt and blame simply for being male. The result is a knotted tangle of fear, anger, blame, defensiveness, guilt, pain, denial, ambivalence, and confusion. The more we pull at it, the tighter it gets.

Unraveling the knot of privilege begins with getting clear about what privilege really is, about what it's got to do with each of us, and about how everyone can see themselves as part of the process of change toward something better. Based on more than twenty years of work, I try to chart a course organized around three questions:

What are we participating in and how are we choosing to participate in it?
How do typical ways of thinking about privilege blind us to what's going on?
What can we do to make a difference?

My books, The Gender Knot and Privilege, Power, and Difference are written from a deeply held belief that privilege and oppression are not inevitable features of human life and that the choices each of us make matter more than we can ever know. My work offers a practical, compassionate, and readable guide to understanding what we're stuck in and how to search for a way out.

My Latest Book My novel, The First Thing and the Last, a story of a woman's struggle to heal from domestic violence, will be published early next year. To learn more about this and my other books, use the "Books" menu on the sidebar. To receive an email when the novel becomes available, click here.

For shorter writings that you can read online, use the "Essays" menu.

The tree in the sidebar is a useful metaphor for systems of privilege. Click on the image if you'd like to know more.

Photo by Mark Bennington