Give us some history, Johnson!

Allan G. Johnson didn't offer anything new, but he did manage to masterfully distill down some of the most talked-about themes of oppression in the opening chapters of his book Power, Privilege, and Difference. I was struck by his ability to put in simple terms some remarkably complex ideas from critical race theory, anthropology, and psychological studies of issues like race, gender, and class. In fact - and this is high praise coming from me - Johnson's style reminded me of the first book I recommend to every teacher I meet, Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?

But there was one theme that I thought was conspicuously absent from Johnson's writing. He framed the entire book around the importance of naming issues: "You can't deal with a problem if you don't name it," he claimed. "Once you name it, you can think, talk, and write about it. You can make sense of it by seeing how it's connected to other things that explain it and point towards solutions" (p 11). Johnson goes on to list privilege, dominance, oppression, and a litany of other words that make us privileged folk feel icky and uncomfortable sometimes - and he goes on to say lots of useful things about each of those words. But he never mentions white supremacy. He certainly alludes to it (i.e. on p 37: "being white is valued in this society"), but he never names it. Other authors like Jeff Duncan Andrade are starting to point out that white privilege has become a more common term; white supremacy is still taboo. Put another way, people are feeling at least somewhat comfortable hearing about the ways that I have it easier because I'm white; society still isn't ready to hear that we have a history of systematically valuing whiteness, at the expense of other races.

All of these semantics led me to realize I had one major problem with Johnson's writing: it was totally ahistorical. If Charlottesville has shown us anything, it's that parts of America's racial history that many of us thought were a thing of the past are, in fact, still alive and kicking. White supremacy is not just reading a laughable sidebar about white hoods in the Jim Crow era from a crummy old high school textbook. Those groups still exist. And even though I'm grateful that Johnson explained a bunch of social hierarchies with the lucidity that he did, the fact remains that without a nuanced understanding of the historical roots of oppression and resistance to it, we're going to be at a loss for how to change things. But if we remember to always weave the historical narrative into our explanations of how to create a world ever more free from oppression - well, then there's hope.