Unraveling Assumptions

Unraveling Assumptions: A Primer for Understanding Oppression and Privilege offers fundamental understandings of concepts and frameworks related to diversity and social justice. Aimed at university and community audiences, it offers an introductory exploration of power, privilege, and oppression as foundations of systems of inequality and examines complexities within meanings and lived experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and social class.

After considering why it is so difficult to engage these issues, the authors explore meanings and impacts of power, privilege, and oppression as a primary lens of analysis. Subsequent chapters offer definitions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and social class, identifying erroneous assumptions and challenging the tendency to oversimplify and decontextualize. Meanings, identities, and effects of oppression and privilege are central foci within each chapter. The book ends with a chapter examining ways that individuals may take action as allies and advocates to resist oppression. Throughout the book, Unraveling Assumptions makes connections among individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels of inequality, while focusing on relational and psychological implications for lived experience—including the reader’s lived experience.

By integrating social science research with concrete examples and personal reflection, this concise, introductory level text invites the reader to consider the costs of systemic hierarchies for all people and envision possible alternatives to participating in oppressive hierarchy.

Unraveling Assumptions is a book for students and community to learn about privilege and oppression. The authors' companion book Teaching Diversity Relationally offers process-oriented guidance for educators teaching this material to successfully negotiate the inherent psychological and relational challenges.