Allan G. Johnson
Allan G. Johnson is a novelist, nonfiction writer, sociologist, teacher, and public speaker who has spent much of his life trying to understand the human condition, especially as shaped by issues of gender, race, and social class. His nonfiction books have been translated into several languages, and his first novel, The First Thing and the Last, was recognized in 2010 by Publishers Weekly as a notable debut work of fiction and named a “Great Read” by O Magazine. His memoir, Not from Here, was published in 2015.
He was born in Washington, DC, in 1946 and at the age of six went with his family to live for two years in Oslo, Norway, where his father worked in the U.S. embassy. Returning from Norway, his family settled in Massachusetts where he did the rest of his growing up. He wrote his first (very) short story when he was ten years old. He wrote poetry and short fiction all through high school, winning awards for both in his senior year, and continued writing on into college.
He earned a PhD in Sociology at the University of Michigan in 1968 and taught for eight years at Wesleyan University. During this time—when the radical feminist women's movement was at its height—he became involved in the rape crisis movement and began his exploration of patriarchy and systems of privilege.
Striking out on his own after not receiving tenure, he spent a year writing short stories before the necessity to earn a living took him back to nonfiction writing and part-time college teaching.
By the late 1990s he was writing and speaking widely about issues of privilege and oppression, and he had finally returned to his roots as a fiction writer with the start of his first novel, The First Thing and the Last, a story of healing and redemption in the aftermath of domestic violence. His second novel, Nothing Left to Lose, the story of a family in crisis during the Vietnam War, was published in 2011.
He lives with his life partner, Nora L. Jamieson, in the hills of northwestern Connecticut.
“It is more likely that the paths others have chosen influence the paths I choose. This suggests that the simplest way to help others make different choices is to make them myself, and to do it openly. As I shift the patterns of my own participation in the systemps of privilege, I make it easier for others to do so as well, and harder for them not to. Simply by setting an example - rather than trying to change them - I crate the possibility of their participating in change in their own time and in their own way. In this way I widen the circle of change without provoking the kind of defensiveness that perpetuates paths of least resistance and the oppressive systems they serve.”
“To justify such direct forms of imperialism and oppression, whites developed the IDEA of whiteness to define a privileged social category elevated above everyone who wasn't included in it. This made it possible to reconcile conquest, treachery, slavery, and genocide, with the nation's newly professed ideals of democracy, freedom, and human dignity. If whiteness define what it meant to be human, then it was seen as less off an offense against the Constitution (not to mention God) to dominate and oppress those who happened to fall outside that definition as the United States marched onward toward what was popularly perceived as its Manifest Destiny.”
“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.”
“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.”
“One way to see the constructed nature of reality is to notice how the definitions of different "races" change historically, by including groups at one time that were excluded in another. The Irish, for example, were long considered by the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of England and the United States to be members of a nonwhite "race", as were Italians, Jews, and people from a number of Eastern European countries. As such, immigrants from these groups to England and the United States were excluded and subjugated and exploited in much the same way that blacks were.”