This brief supplemental book provides students with an easily applied theoretical model for thinking about systems of privilege and difference. Writing in accessible, conversational prose, Johnson joins theory with engaging examples in ways that enable students to see the nature and consequences of privilege and their connection to it.
Introduction
1. Rodney King’s Question
2. We’re in Trouble
We Can’t Talk About It If We Can’t Use the Words
3. The Trouble We’re In: Power, Privilege, and Difference
Difference Is Not the Problem/
Mapping Difference: Who Are We?/
The Social Construction of Difference/
What Is Privilege?/
Privilege as Paradox/
Oppression: The Flip Side of Privilege/
4. Capitalism, Class, and The Matrix of Domination
How Capitalism Works/
Capitalism and Class/
Capitalism, Difference, and Privilege: Race and Gender/
The Matrix of Domination and the Paradox of Being Privileged and Unprivileged at the Same Time
5. Making Privilege Happen
Avoidance, Exclusion, Rejection, and Worse/
Trouble for Whom?/
And That’s Not All/
We Can’t Heal Until the Wounding Stops/
6. The Trouble with the Trouble
7. Privilege, Power, Difference, and Us
Individualism: Or, the Myth that Everything Is Somebody’s Fault/
Individuals, Systems, and Paths of Least Resistance/
What It Means to Be Involved in Privilege and Oppression/
8. How Systems of Privilege Work
Dominance/
Identified with Privilege/
Privilege at the Center/
The Isms/
The Isms and Us/
9. Getting off the Hook: Denial and Resistance
Deny and Minimize/
Blame the Victim/
Call It Something Else/
It’s Better This Way/
It Doesn’t Count If You Don’t Mean It/
I’m One of the Good Guys/
Sick and Tired/
Getting Off the Hook by Getting On/
10. What Can We Do? Becoming Part of the Solution
Myth#1: “It’s Always Been This Way, and It Always Will Be”/
Myth #2: Gandhi’s Paradox and The Myth of No Effect/
Stubborn Ounces: What Can We Do?/
What’s In It for Me?
Acknowledgements
Notes
Resources
Index