Allan G. Johnson Quotes

The truth doesn't matter because ideology isn't about truth or accuracy. Rather, its purpose is to support and perpetuate the status quo by making it appear normal and legitimate... And when someone dares to challenge that comforting reality, it's easy to confuse the bearer of bad news with the bad news itself. When people of color call attention to the divisions caused by white privilege, for example, they're often accused of creating those divisions, as if racism isn't a problem unless you talk about it.

It is easier to allow a few women to occupy positions of authority and dominance than to question whether social life should be organized around principles of hierarchy, control, and dominance at all, to allow a few women to reach the heights of the corporate hierarchy rather than question whether people's needs should depend on an economic system based on dominance, control, and competition. It is easier to allow women to practice law than to question adversarial conflict as a model for resolving disputes and achieving justice. It has even been easier to admit women to military combat roles than to question the acceptability of warfare and its attendant images of patriarchal masculine power and heroism as instruments of national policy. And it has been easier to elevate and applaud a few women than to confront the cultural misogyny that is never far off, waiting in the wings and available for anyone who wants to use it to bring women down and put them in their place.

If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.

Women's potential to disrupt patriarchy and make men vulnerable is why it's so easy for women to make men feel foolish or emasculated through the mildest humor that focuses on maleness and hints at women's power to stop going along with the status quo.

This was especially true of the Irish in Ireland in relation to the British, who for centuries treated them as an inferior race. Note, however, that their skin color was indistinguishable from that of those considered to be "white". If anything, the skin of most people of Irish descent is "fairer" than that of others of European heritage. But their actual complexion didn't matter, because the dominant racial group has the cultural authority to define the boundaries around "white" as it chooses.

As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.

subordinate groups are often pitted against one another in ways that draw attention away from the system of privilege that hurts them all.

People are tagged with other labels that point to the lowest-status group they belong to, as in "woman doctor" or "black writer," but never "white lawyer" or male senator". Any category that lowers our status relative to others' can be used to mark us; to be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked.

There is no such thing as doing nothing. There is no such thing as neutral or uninvolved. At every moment, social life involves all of us.