Second of a series on the elements and emotions involved with successful community-based innovation. While each blog stands alone, you’ll get the best understanding if you read them in order.
My first lesson in relative power came as I started first grade. My mother had petitioned the school board for me to attend school where she taught, up the street from a large public housing “project.” She told me, “You will know your people.” I was a teacher’s kid, required by my teacher-parents to speak European English, with long braids before this era of hair extensions. I got beat up the first day. They had raw power. We figured it out, that my attacker and I each had different types of power. As a teacher’s kid, I could quietly get you fed because I could walk into the cafeteria and ask for snacks. I could get you clothed because I knew where the secret clothes closet was. I could help you with your homework and I had the time and energy to listen to what happened at your house last night. I could even get you out of trouble, if you really did not do whatever the principal thought you did, because she believed me. In an inequitable system, we made our own subversive equity. I never learned how to fight because I had outcome power, and people willing to protect me on through high school. The system that privileged me was unfair, but we kids moved within it according to the respective powers we had.
I have found that good people often don’t like to think about power. It seems like the antithesis of humility to dwell on it. But, in order to move responsibly in the social innovation space, you need to interrogate your power and your relationship to it.
As a “Model University Professor” for 15 years, I would speak during campus-wide orientation for Teaching Assistants. I asked them to consider the power they were about to have in the classroom. I became familiar with the looks of confusion, discomfort, even fear. I told them that their students were already acutely aware of their power and, if the new teachers were not thinking about the power that they carried into the room, they would be the only people in the room who were not. I’ve seen the same looks on the faces of professionals and volunteers when asked to ponder their considerable power. I have found that highly ethical people often don’t like to think much about their power, even while they are using it.
If you have never thought much about the role of power you have, I would suggest that means you have it, that you are not very experienced in the effect of others’ power in your life. Your power can be so assumed, that you don’t interrogate it.
And just as often, others are highly aware of your power. My grandmother had a saying—”Women can look up longer than men can look down.” It is a wonderful, and slightly naughty, double entrendre. Those with less overt power often know more about the powerful than the other way around. They must, in order to survive. Privilege means you can get away with knowing less. Understand that a person with less visible power can often read you in about 2 seconds, seeing more about you than you might see about yourself.
As most dictators come to learn, power is rarely absolute; even violent, coercive power can be and is countered. We are still learning of the resistances of Black American slaves, of Jewish intelligence agents, that contributed to the downfall of their tormenters. Everybody, in any situation, has some power, some of it more visible than others. When millions of individual “ordinary” Black South Africans were willing to die, it spelled the eventual end of apartheid. As one man on the street told a reporter-friend of mine, “They don’t have enough bullets to kill all of us.”
I also told those Teaching Assistants a true story about an instructor who was so abusive, the students stood up and left en masse. They had power that the instructor had never considered. The point is to go into the helping arena with your eyes open. Often people will misjudge the power levels. They underestimate the power of individuals and groups in the community and overestimate their own ability to create change without them.
Leaving your power and theirs unexamined also opens the door to pity.
