The Forest and the Trees

by Allan Johnson

  Notice also how their choices fit into the sociological model. By stepping off the path of least resistance, they changed the ecology and the structure of that small system known as a lunch counter. They altered patterns of interaction and the arrangement of people in physical space, which is the essence of segregation. Their actions challenged not only the distribution of power that had kept these arrangements in place as cornerstones of white privilege but also the worldview of race that had made it seem the natural order of things. This, in turn, produced all kinds of consequences, including tension and conflict and the manager closing the lunch counter and more people showing up the next day and so on, all of which continued to affect how the system happened from one moment to the next. Those consequences reverberated from that small place to much larger systems, and on and on from there, including my retelling of the story in these pages and whatever effect this might have on the people who read it and the people whose lives they will affect.

  This is how social life happens and how it may change. But notice that for all the years of struggle over civil rights, white privilege is still alive and well in the United States. Why? In part, it is because white elites have the power to slow the pace of change by controlling social institutions. But a deeper answer lies in the dominant worldview that makes the reality of race either appear as normal and acceptable or not appear at all, to be invisible. To understand change, then, and how it is resisted, we must also understand something more about worldviews that makes us reluctant to give them up.

  A Worldview Is Hard to Change

  The history of white privilege depended on the cultural invention of the ideas of race in general and whiteness in particular as part of a radical shift in the European worldview. It helped create a taken-for-granted reality in which an institution like slavery might appear not only to ‘make sense’ but also to be morally acceptable, if not an act of virtue in the fulfillment of God’s intention.

  So, too, does our understanding of that history depend on a sociological worldview that is itself at odds with the prevailing worldview in our society. In part, this conflict is due to the tendency of many sociologists to focus on issues of social justice and inequality, a perspective that has always been a minority point of view. But the main reason for the sociological worldview’s not taking hold in the United States is that it directly conflicts with the individualistic model that is the bedrock of our culture.

  If we were to adopt the view that social life happens through a dynamic relation between people and social systems, it would upend the American fixation on the individual, a core part of our worldview that endures in spite of the fact that it is not based in reality. This would also challenge the use of individualism as a way to rationalize inequality and oppression so as to protect privilege in all its forms. It is no surprise, then, that sociology is often viewed as a somewhat alien way of thinking: in the context of the dominant American worldview, it is.

  Worldviews are resistant to change because we depend on them as the sum total of what we know or think we know or just assume, consciously or not, a vast collection of interconnected beliefs, values, attitudes, images, and memories. Most of the time a worldview provides the deep unconscious background that enables us to navigate reality from one moment to the next. It shapes how we see everything, from the cosmos and what happens when we die to why people do what they do. It provides the material out of which we construct a taken-for-granted reality that we do not have to question or even think about. It shapes not only what we perceive as real but also how we make sense of it, how we explain what happens and what is and is not, and how we justify what we do in any given situation. Even more powerful is that we tend not to be aware that worldviews even exist or of how complex they are. Expose one part to scrutiny and doubt and you cannot help but bring others into question.

  When I consider why it is so hard to change a worldview—whether someone else’s or my own—I find that it depends on how it came to be there, what authority is behind it, and how ‘centrally located’ or interconnected it is in relation to the rest. My worldview, for example, includes the belief that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. That bit of reality was added when I read about it somewhere. I do not remember where or when it was, but I do know I adopted this piece of information because the source was identified as science, and my worldview includes a general trust in what scientists claim as true, knowing all the while that it can change as new evidence comes to light. Adding this belief to my worldview happened in a particular moment in a particular way and from a particular source, and I could have decided against it or withheld judgment for one reason or another, as I sometimes do.

  What I take to be real about the age of the Earth is a simple and isolated piece of my and many other people’s worldview. It is not connected to other beliefs that matter to me and has little effect on my life, so I don’t really care whether it’s true and would not hesitate to give it up if scientists came out and said the age of the Earth was, say, 3.3 billion years.

  It is a very different matter to believe in race or capitalism, ideas that we acquired without our knowing it, being almost literally in the air we breathe from the moment we are born and then repeated and affirmed over the years in stories and images and what people say and do. As they become embedded in an expanding web of beliefs, values, experience, and feeling, they acquire so many connections to other parts of our worldview that they can seem to originate from everywhere at once, to have no origin at all but instead to have been for all time, giving them an authority far wider and deeper than that of any particular source. Instead of being the belief of a person, a group, or even a society, they appear as something beyond the reach of mere evidence, opinion, time, or place, not beliefs at all but intuitively true, undeniable, obvious, the way things are, what everybody knows, ordained by God, immutable facts.

  So it is that the core principles of white dominance, white identification, and white centeredness have come to be embedded in and indispensable to the mainstream American worldview, along with an almost religious belief in capitalism. This has provided generation after generation of Americans with a lens through which to perceive, interpret, and shape both what is seen to be real and what is imagined to be possible.

  Unlike adopting an idea about the age of the Earth, however, we do not decide one day that from now on we are going to believe in race and capitalism. To the extent that we do believe, it is because we grew up with an unquestioned sense of knowing it to be so, as something that is second nature and taken for granted as undoubtedly true.

  It is an awareness of this kind of ‘knowing’ that is perhaps the most important thing I have acquired from sociology as a worldview, because it was through this that I came to realize that I even had a worldview that I might step back to examine and understand. It is in this way that sociology can provide both a mirror in which to see ourselves in ways we otherwise would not and a window into a larger world, both as it is and what it might become.

  Epilogue

  Who Are We Really?

  On a cool spring evening some years ago, I took a walk down a street I lived on in a small university town. Darkness was just coming on, and only a few people were on the street. As I walked along, I drew closer to a young woman walking in the opposite direction. I had never seen her before, but as we approached each other, I sensed something that startled and perplexed me. And, as my vivid memory of that moment shows, it still troubles me decades later. As we passed each other, she dropped her head, averted her eyes, quickened her step, and veered just a little to one side to widen the gap between us. She seemed to shrink in her body, as if to take up less space. She was, I realized suddenly, afraid of me, walking down this peaceful street on this lovely evening—afraid of me, who hadn’t the slightest inclination to do her any harm.

  But her reaction had nothing to do with what I intended. It had to do with my belonging to a social category of people—adult males—who are the source of most of the world
’s violence and almost all the violence and harassment directed at women. That was all she knew about me, and yet apparently this was enough to stir up fear and deference as she moved to hand the sidewalk over to me at that instant of our passing. That wasn’t what I wanted, but what I wanted didn’t matter, which is the sociological point of the story and the core of my dilemma as an individual.

  Social life produces all kinds of consequences, including paths of least resistance that shape how we perceive and think about one another, how we feel, what we do. We are not the paths. They exist in a given situation, regardless of whether we know about them or whether they lead where we would like to go. That I have never been sexually harassing or violent is sociologically irrelevant, because the power and threat that she associated with the status of ‘adult male’ are rooted in a male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered world in which we both participated. Since there is no typical violent or harassing male, nothing about me marked me personally as a dangerous individual, but there was also nothing about me that could assure her that I was not. The same was true for her as a potential target, since the characteristic that victims of sexual harassment and violence have most in common is the simple fact of being female. In short, in a patriarchal society, my being male was enough to mark me as a threat, and her being female was enough for her to feel vulnerable to being singled out as a target.

  When I realized what was going on, my first reaction was to defend myself. After all, I’m not one of them, I thought. I’m Allan the individual, not just a member of some social category. I teach and write and speak about issues of male privilege. I volunteered at a rape crisis service. In a sense, then, I was right, but in another sense, I was quite wrong. My struggle and confusion were over what to make of these categories I belong to, which are most of what many people ever know of me, and certainly all that young woman could know in that moment.

  What I came to realize still later was that my insistence on being treated as an individual separate from my place in social systems was a luxury that I could afford in part because of the privilege attached to those same positions. Like many white men, I did not want to think about race or gender or about my being a man and white as significant and problematic in a sexist, racist world. Because if I did, I would have to rethink my comfortable assumptions about how my life was connected to other people’s lives through the systems in which we all participate.

  When white men complain about affirmative-action programs, for example, they tend to draw attention to issues of individual merit.1 They are well aware of their own talents and hard work and want to attribute what they get and what they deserve solely to that. What they ignore are the social advantages they have over white women and people of color who are just as talented and work just as hard as they do. They ignore the fact that their success depends in part on the competition being limited by barriers routinely placed in front of them.

  People of color, for example, are surrounded by a society in which the path of least resistance is to treat them as invisible, to offer them little encouragement and support in school, and, when all else fails, to openly discriminate against them. And because the white advantage is built into the structure of systems, it does not require open and deliberate discrimination in order to work. In most corporations, for example, the only way to get ahead is to have someone above you notice your potential and act as your mentor and sponsor.2 Most mentors and sponsors tend to select those they feel most ‘comfortable’ with—meaning those who are most like them. Since most people who are in a high-enough position to offer mentoring are white, the path of least resistance is to select other whites to bring along.

  As long as the promotion process is organized in this way, the advantages that go along with white privilege will continue, even though white people typically do not experience them as such. They will be aware of how hard they have worked to get ahead, so that when a program like affirmative action comes along, they may cry foul at the ‘unfair advantages’ being given to others. What they do not see are the unfair advantages that are so deeply embedded in how the system is organized that they don’t stand out as advantages at all, but simply the way things are normally and appropriately done.

  It is hard to sort out who we are in relation to the statuses we occupy, to get a clear sense of some ‘real me’ that participates in social systems but is also more than that. It is a complexity that holds especially true in societies that place a high value on individualism. We certainly are more than status occupants and role players, but from the moment we are born, just about everything we experience is so entwined with one system or another that the distinction between us and our statuses and roles is hard to make.

  I believe, for example, that I have a soul, and that my soul is not a social creation. But the belief itself and all the ways I have available for thinking about ‘soul’—beginning with the word itself—are rooted in one culture or another. In moments of spiritual practice, I may have experiences that seem separate from the world and social systems. I can have moments in which I seem to stop thinking altogether and sense a reality deeper than words, deeper than thought shaped by culture. But such moments are few and far between, and although they remind me that there is more to human existence than what we know as social life, their fleeting nature also reminds me that social life is what my individual life is about most of the time.

  When that young woman and I passed each other on the sidewalk that evening, whatever fear she felt was based on my status as a man in relation to her status as a woman in a world that relates those statuses to each other in particular ways. It was based on a social reality that does not fit many of the ideas I have about myself or how I experience myself. But this doesn’t mean that she was reacting to something unreal, because the social reality she and I participated in was every bit as real as the ‘real me’ and the ‘real her’ in that moment. Neither of us created that reality, and as individuals, we could do little to change it by ourselves. But it was, whether we liked it or not, connected to who we were and how we saw and acted in relation to each other.

  In this way, sociological practice draws us repeatedly to the fact that everything is connected to everything else in one way or another. No experience, no action is complete unto itself. Everything is fundamentally relational. The global economy is about not only nations and flows of capital but also families and communities and neighborhoods and job prospects and stress and arguments over the dinner table and lying awake worrying in the middle of the night. A large-scale problem, such as poverty, is about not only how individuals choose to live but also the systems they participate in that shape the alternatives from which they choose and the paths of least resistance they are encouraged to follow. And something as seemingly simple and unremarkable as two people passing on a sidewalk or having a conversation turns out to be far from it, for it, too, happens in relation to a larger context that shapes its course and gives it meaning.

  At every level of social life, the practice of sociology takes us toward a fuller understanding of what is going on and why we feel and act as we do. It provides a foundation for a deeper and clearer awareness of how our lives are connected to these ‘things larger than ourselves.’

  But the promise of sociology is much greater than that, as the ability to see how social life works becomes a routine part of how it works, as sociological thinking becomes a pervasive part of culture itself and the worldview we draw on to construct reality. Sociology then becomes a powerful collective tool in the struggle to understand and do something about the problems that cause so much injustice and unnecessary suffering. It empowers us to look at how we participate in social systems and to see ways to take some small share of responsibility for the consequences that social life produces, to become not only participants in the problem but also part of the solution.

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1

  1. For a classic article on the nature of privilege, see Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Mal
e Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Research on Women, 1988).

  2. Based on research conducted by Professor Michael Dawson of the University of Chicago, national interviews conducted between October 28 and November 17, 2005.

  3. There are, of course, numerous examples of cultures and historical periods where families have behaved in this way, especially in relation to daughters. But in such places as the United States, where organizations are routinely likened to families, this is not how normal family life is viewed.

  4. For more on the concept of role conflict, see Erving Goffman, Encounters (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961); Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enl. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968); and David A. Snow and Leon Anderson, “Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities,” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 6 (1987): 1336–1371.

  5. For a comprehensive summary of findings about the causes of suicide, see David Lester, Why People Kill Themselves, 4th ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2000).

  6. World Health Organization, Suicide Prevention Programs, January 2007, available at www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html; American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 2013, available at www.afsp.org/understanding-suicide/facts-and-figures.