Defining, understanding, moving, and relating to power

Karla Monterroso
Nov 2 · 6 min read

The pain of this moment screams our lack of nuance and understanding of the power dynamics in our own country. We are all in the middle of a conversation about race, but we seem to be trying to have it without ever having had a conversation about power. You cannot separate race and power in this country, The concept of race was created for the explicit purpose of the distribution of power in America.

So I’ll be writing from time to time to try and open up for myself what I’ve learned about power over the course of my life. I have a huge desire for that writing to be personal because I think it is easier to learn ideas through stories than it is to learn them through definitions but here are a few of those too.

Power = access to money, information, decision-making rights, and reach of your ideas

All of these things boil down to the ability to make change.

Anyone can make change; anyone can have power.

However, access to money, information, decision-making rights and reach of your ideas facilitate or obstruct the ability to make that change.

Resources / Risk = Safety

Resources = access to social, psychosocial, economic, and physical abilities/tools

Risk = possible harm to your social, psychosocial, economic, and physical person/standing

The more access you have to resources, the more likely you can undertake the experiences that provide you with personal power (access to money, information, decision-making rights and reach of your ideas)

Actual Safety = the ability to retain a level of social, psychosocial, economic, and physical equanimity that isn’t devastating

Perceived Safety = the ability to retain all levels of gained social, psychosocial, economic, and physical equanimity at all times with no fluctuation

Actual danger = a threat/level of heightened risks to your ultimate social, psychosocial, economic, and physical standing/abilities

Perceived danger = a threat/level of heightened risks to any of your social, psychosocial, economic, and physical standing/abilities

However, at every level of power acquisition, our perception of risks heightens even as our actual risks can generally get lower.

The ability to distinguish between an actual danger to safety and a shift in power HUGELY depends on a person’s relationship with power.

People have different relationships with power:

Power as a belonging

Power as a trophy

Power as a spatula

Power as an enemy

Power as a belonging: The people who see power as a belonging often see it as a thing they are entitled to or should have a turn with. A thing they parade around almost spitefully to show how untouchable they are.

Power as a trophy: The folks who treat power as a trophy see it as a goal to attain, an endpoint which they will fight for — often at the cost of many things around them. Once they have it, they can speed right by knowing they have it because the thirst of it blinds folks to actually having attained it. They are validated by power. Enjoy proximity to it. It provides a measure of self-worth/value.

Power as a spatula: Power as a spatula people, they don’t particularly have a fondness for power but can see its utility. It is only worth as much as it allows a person to do.

Power as an enemy: Then you have power as enemy folks. They see the enterprise of power as innately evil. They condemn it and it’s acquisition at every turn.

A person is relating to power as a belonging or a trophy will be tempted to see any shift in power as dangerous. As a risk to their own value or worth.

It is tempting to replace psychosocial and physical well-being with economic and social resources when we gain power if we aren’t careful and that makes us less physically and psychosocially resilient thus any push back can feel like a risk to your own power.

I remember a moment that makes me absolutely wince now when I think about it when an employee had gotten another job at a tech company. Huge messy power dynamics. I am running a non-profit and I often chafe at tech’s tendency to skip out on growing entry-level talent, instead, they decide to poach from non-profits and/or less monied partners that do make those investments. Because I had a relationship with a leader at said company, I called them to ask why they would take an employee like that without caring for the relationship. While my direct feedback to the person was certainly addressing the management of power a very monied company should have with a non-profit partner, I completely ignored the power dynamic in play when a young person getting a new job would have their first experience of that job be an executive at their old employer calling to say wtf to their new employer. It is something I would never ever do today. If you think about this framework through that lens I was challenging an inequity around money by risking the economic freedom of a junior employee. Yes, as a non-profit the structures I run have less power, but an employee 2 years out of college has even less power than that.

It is really difficult to admit that for many of us even when we have had very realistic or punishing relationships to power, experiencing our first executive jobs/tastes of having actual power can push us to relate to power as a trophy. I mean, how could we not? You spend your whole life knowing that access to money, information, decision-making rights, and reach of your ideas could facilitate so much for so many people. It would be near impossible, or at least take folks much more enlightened than me to finally attain a measure of power and not feel like it’s loss in any measure would be catastrophic.

When you’ve done social justice work for most of your life, you’re so used to asking, pushing, strategizing to get power — that I genuinely think it is tough to conceive of the excesses of that power or what an abuse of it can look like in practice. It is easy in some ways to abuse power because you don’t get that your normal actions carry new weight and meaning with power behind them.

It is equally really difficult for people who have had systemic/structural power for most of their lives to even be able to see that they are not just entitled to that power. I’m a large company with all the resources in the world, I competed for talent and won is one lens of what that company did. My resources make it a lot easier for my moves to be less and less risky. I can thus move with impunity if I want to. Having this power isn’t just natural and being asked to distribute it is not a danger to your social, psychosocial, economic, and/or physical abilities. This is why you often hear people say when you have privilege justice feels like oppression.

It is here you can see how we have a generational problem with power. Our leaders were told that power was the hoarding of money, information, decision-making rights, and reach of ideas. It is that hoarding that has thrown the country into chaos. Whoever had the most of it made the rules.

What technology has done is separate money, information, decision-making rights, and reach of ideas as a singular nucleus. There are people who have power, as a result, to access of a single one of these instead of having access to all of them. This is pretty new as a development in human history. Those things were really intertwined for most of our time.

It is this reason why we are seeing so much pushback as folks with power start to act in ways that bind these things up as one destiny all over again. The internet promised a world in which more people had more power. However, it did not promise or factor in how a single one of these elements of power could be abused to gain the others and obstruct the access of that power to folk as a result.

Well, that was a lot for today. Like I said, I’ll be writing more about this as ideas and stories start to gel for me. Let me know what you think. I would love other perspectives.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade