This paper examines Allan Johnson's argument that social differences in American society — including race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation — are not natural facts but socially constructed categories laden with culturally assigned meaning. Drawing on Johnson, Patricia Williams, and Bronson and Merryman, the paper explores how these constructions sustain systemic privilege and structural inequality. It uses the film Crash (2004) to illustrate how stereotyping operates in everyday life, and traces the historical roots of institutionalized racism in the United States. The paper concludes by addressing how dysconscious racism perpetuates inequality even among those who consider themselves color-blind, and calls for critical awareness as a precondition for genuine equality.
Allan Johnson's article discusses how various forms of difference in American society are socially constructed. He begins his argument by referring to a comment made by American novelist James Baldwin, who once suggested that there were in reality no blacks or whites, but only the perceptions of blackness and whiteness.[1] Johnson and Baldwin do not reject the physiological differences people may have, but Johnson's powerful argument suggests that the social meanings we attach to our physiological differences have become more significant in our lives than the differences themselves. That is the essence of social construction.
A "white" person is not simply someone with a light complexion, but in our society we attach a whole set of characteristics and behavioral traits that we presumably believe belong to a white person. It is this premise that allows many people to say that certain groups do, or do not, act "white" — or, for that matter, "black."
Johnson argues that the same approach holds true with regard to what we consider to be "normal." The "normal" in our social perception is the standard against which we assess those who do not conform to it. In this way, we attach a list of characteristics and traits to people who demonstrate differences in their appearance or behavior. These characteristics are not necessarily real. For example, as Johnson argues, we do not consider the 100 million Americans who cannot see properly without eyeglasses as "disabled," because we have grown accustomed to assuming that visual problems are universal and therefore normal. However, in many other cases a person's disability becomes a marker — an identity. "And that difference is not a matter of the disability itself," Johnson writes, "but of how it is constructed in society and how we then make use of that construction in our minds to shape how we think about ourselves and other people and how we treat them as a result."[2]
The social construction of difference is vividly illustrated in the film Crash (2004).[3] In the scene where Farhad, a Persian man, and his daughter Dorri attempt to buy a gun, the shop owner refuses to sell to them. In the owner's eyes, Farhad and Dorri are not merely people from Iran; they are presumed to carry different characteristics and traits that make them unreliable. When Farhad is escorted outside, Dorri manages to complete the purchase — but only after enduring verbal sexual harassment from the shop owner, a man who has been socialized to assume that women deserve, to some degree, to be harassed.
In another scene, Jean — played by Sandra Bullock — instructs her husband to hire a different locksmith after seeing that the one working in their apartment is a Hispanic man. For Jean, the locksmith is not simply someone who is ethnically Hispanic; he is presumed to have the characteristics of a gang member. These scenes demonstrate how socially constructed categories shape real human interactions, often with harmful consequences for those who are stereotyped.
At the heart of the social construction of difference lies a systemic and structural inequality based on privilege. Contrary to the traditional American notion of meritocracy, people in America generally possess privilege not based on what they are capable of doing, but because of their physical appearance, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, social class, and other social markers. The more a person shares the characteristics of what is considered "normal," the more privileged he or she tends to be. Since it is "normal" in America to be heterosexual, heterosexual men and women are more privileged than homosexuals. Likewise, since it is considered "normal" for men to hold positions in government or corporate offices, a woman working in those spaces is judged not only for what she does, but also for how her gender supposedly affects her behavior and performance.
Like difference itself, our identities are also constructed by various social forces. As Patricia Williams argues, racial identities are shaped by how the dominant racial group — whites — imposes its views on others. Whites decide what it means to be a person of color. "[I]n a world of normative whiteness," Williams points out, "whiteness [is] defined as the absence of color."[4] So we speak of "people of color" to refer to non-whites, a characterization built on the assumption that whites have no color. "Those who privilege themselves as Un-raced," Williams writes of whites, "are always anxiously maintaining that it doesn't matter, even as they are quite busy feeling pity, no less, and thankful to God for their great good luck in having been spared so intolerable an affliction."[5]
"Children develop racial bias without parental guidance"
"Racism, privilege, and oppression reinforce each other"
"Colonial-era racism institutionalized for economic benefit"
"Color-blindness masks ongoing systemic racial inequality"
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