"What it All Has to Do with Us"

In “What it All Has to Do with Us,” Allan Johnson’s thesis is that individualistic thinking causes a lot of problems that lead to the trouble surrounding privilege, power, and difference.

Accoding to this reading many people are often even afraid to talk about problems involving racism and unfair treatment because they dread the blame and anger that often come with these topics. For instance, a white person may feel uncomfortable talking to a black person about slavery due to there being an underlying blame from occurrences of slavery that the white person had absolutely nothing to do with many years ago. Since “We live in a society that encourages us to think that the social world begins and ends with individuals,” we are also bound to be blind to the mere existence of privilege, because it has nothing to do with individuals, but with the social categories we end up in. Contrary to this belief, social life occurs only as we participate in social systems, by learning to participate in social life from families, schools, religion, etc. that make up our personal identity as well as by participating in these systems to make them occur in the first place. Also discussed is the idea that we choose to take paths of least resistance in our everyday lives to avoid being looked at as abnormal by the rest of society. For example, when standing in an elevator, a person would not normally stand with their back facing the door because this would be a path of greater resistance and he or she may be afraid of what would happen if they did. “What we experience as social life happens through ha complex dynamic between systems…and the choices people make as they participate in them and helpt make them happen.”

I agree with Johnson in that we often think of ourselves in an individualistic way, instead of the social causes of the problems in the world today. For example, women often think that since men have a name for themselves as being “sexist pigs,” then all men must be this way. This is the same with aspects of slavery as well as racism and religions. Just because of a few bad decisions by people of a certain group does not mean that everyone else in that particular group behave or think the same way. This individualistic way of thinking splits the world up into different kinds of people (good and bad) and, in effect, allows us to categorize people unfairly.

This article was a commendable one in that it pointed out many important concepts regarding the individualistic thinking of people in our society. People are afraid to be different than the rest of society because of the treatment they may experience if they go out of their normal boundaries. Instead, we choose to take the “path of least resistance” when it comes to making decisions and stay in the realms of what society deems to be normal. I think Johnson states it perfectly when he says that the “trouble around privilege and oppression is so pervasive, so long-standing, so huge in its consequences for so many millions of people that it can’t be written off as the misguided doings of a small percentage of people with personality problems.” Instead of blaming the few people who have caused such misleading stereotypes, we choose to blame the group as a whole.