Power and Privilege by Alan Johnson

The reading for this week was power and privilege by Alan Johnson. This piece goes over many factors of privilege like what it is, how it affects people, and other aspects of privilege in today's society. When it came to this piece, one aspect that I found very interesting and thought provoking was the chart the diversity wheel as seen below. This wheel has many different aspects that can affect the privilege of a person placed all around it. The author then goes on to write about their own privileges seen on the wheel and asks the reader to think about their own wheel results and privileges that come along with them. This created a discussion to begin with, but the author takes it further. He then asks the reader to imagine some of the readers original answers changed and what would come along with these changes. This aspect of the reading made me really begin to think about different ways my own life could have been different and how these changes would affect my own life and privileges. Attached HERE, is another great example of a diversity wheel and a similar question could be asked as to how different aspects of your own life changing can affect privilege. Overall, through this work the author does a great job of challenging the readers' preconceived ideas. He refers to the idea of privilege and other similar words and people's ideas that these words are aggressive or inherently bad throughout this text and does a great job of showing that they don't need to be seen this way and instead need to be used to better our society. The author does a great job of talking about the hard conversations people don't want to talk about or feel uncomfortable conversing about and makes the reader really understand the problems of privilege in our society.