You Think You Have Power. Do You?

I have spent quite a long time studying systemic harm, including systems conventionally called white supremacy.

I have argued in many spaces and also on this podcast that it is accurately named white terrorism because it is a systematic use of violence to control populations through fear.

The system was built this way on purpose over five centuries through genocide, slavery, dispossession, colonial occupation, forced labor, rape, economic extraction, segregation, lynching, state violence, and exclusion.

The material outcome is terrorism.

I use the term terrorism deliberately because supremacy is, to me, aspirational language for a system built through atrocity.

It describes the claimed hierarchy and accepts the premise that the people on top somehow arrived there because they were superior.

Terrorism names the method instead of flattering the outcome.

One clarification is necessary because people will inevitably choose to misunderstand the argument if they can.

White in white terrorism names the architecture, not necessarily the skin color of every person who operates within it.

Race was manufactured, ranked, and published as science to license extraction.

The distribution of power did not fall along racial lines by accident.

It was engineered to do exactly that.

The architecture is European, and its operators have never fully been only white, and the fact that people outside the original group can participate in the system does not mean the system disappeared.

If anything, it tells us that the architecture reached maturity.

A system becomes especially powerful when it no longer needs its original architect in order to reproduce itself.

So if we have inherited structures that have spent centuries concentrating economic, political, and institutional power in relatively few hands, what does it take to build power inside them? What does it take to build power outside them, around them, and sometimes without acknowledging them at all? And just as importantly, once we build it, what are we going to use that power for? And the last point and question about what are we going to use that power for is important because individual accumulation is very easily confused as liberation.

A person can acquire real, measurable, consequential power and can change absolutely nothing for the person standing next to them.

The ethical question comes afterwards.

So what is the power actually for? Before getting there, though, I want to distinguish power from agency because I think we confuse those two constantly.

Agency is your capacity to act.

Power is your capacity to affect what happens.

You can have agency without having very much power.

You can apply for a job.

Someone else may still decide whether you get it.

You can ask for a raise.