Allan Johnson "What Can We Do? Becoming Part of the Solution"

Johnson's article from "Privilege, Power, and Difference" is basically about trying to eliminate exclusion, rejection, privilege, harrassment, discrimination, and violence. Johnson feels that "silence and invisibility allow trouble to continue" and in order for it to change poeple have to "do something". Johnson brings up skin privilege numerious times within this text and often repeats that people with power are the ones that dont know they have it, as we have previously discussed in other works we have read over the past few weeks. He also brings up a good point that "privilege exists when one group has something that is systematically denied to others not because of who they are or what theyve done, but because of the social category they belong to." This means that people arent given the opportunites that others are given just because of what class they belong to and how much privilege and power is associated with that class. It doesnt matter how great you are at different things, because you will be judged and placed in a category regardless. This next quote that stood out to me: "oppression also takes many forms, most notably avoidnce, exclusion, rejection, unequal access to resources and rewards, and violence". I think it stuck out to me because I knew before reading it in black and white that this was true, but actually reading them really resignated with me. A statistic that also kind of shocked me was when Johnson said "racial oppression has been a feature of human life for only a matter of centuries, and there is abundant evidence that male dominance has been around for only seven thousand years or so which isnt very long when you consider that human beings have been on the earth fr hundreds of thounsands of years". I didnt ever realize that there was any research about how long male dominance has been around for and it shocked me because I thought males were always the dominant sex between the two.
Overall I enjoyed reading Johnsons' piece and found it interesting and easy to read and understand. The only thing that was sort of annoying to me was that it seemed too wordy and drawn out and I felt he couldve put his ideas into a shorter version. That being said, I learned a lot from this piece and it was one of the only peices this semester that I didnt feel bored reading.