 This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
Writing about how power and powerlessness are intertwined, I can almost predict one specific critical response: But the language of powerful and powerless groups has helped us name real injustices and move toward equality. Are you trying to undo that? No. I think that language has been useful—sometimes essential. It offers a clear moral and political signal: some patterns of social life reliably disadvantage some people. If we can’t name those patterns, we can’t contest them. At the same time, I think the language of “powerful” and “powerless” has a built-in risk: it can harden into a story that flattens reality. And when it flattens reality, it can be used in two opposite—and equally unhelpful—ways. One is to treat a group as uniformly dominant and therefore uniformly suspect. The other is to seize on complexity as proof that inequality isn’t real, or that efforts toward equality are unnecessary or oppressive in themselves. This essay is my attempt to hold onto what the simplification helps us see, without letting it erase what it hides. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.]
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