I’ve been audio-reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, and on top of some other books I’ve experienced in this way, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, there’s something deep in me that feels the violence described, the brutality that has been so frequently applied to bodies by other humans, especially to Black bodies, that quakes with the horror and the recognition that we are humanly capable of these acts. But how? I spend so much time participating in spaces of love and healing and to feel into that reality, that we humans do terrible violent things, can seem both incomprehensible and all too real.
Mostly it’s male humans who are brutalizing bodies. Of course, if you have been socialized into the idea that you shouldn’t show emotions and empathy is ‘weak’ and then you add in power-over, you will see terrible and algorithmically increasing terror as the power is deployed at scale.
Not just male people deploy this power, though typically male people are the ones enacting the body-level violence. Non-male people use their power-over in more subtle and sometimes sneaky ways. We have to acknowledge the scars that so many people live with as a result of others using power-over them. To name what has happened.
I also think about the healing that needs to happen for all the people who’ve found themselves in power-over as a result of this IWSHP form of extractive capitalism. What kind of grief needs to be felt collectively by those who’ve normalized power over?
We have many fables in WEIRD culture of people who were privileged and then became themselves servants that expose our underlying awareness of the unnatural state of this dynamic. Stories about masters and servants generally reflect the relative lack of virtue in dominance.
Yet it’s so tempting to be like, “I don’t have power over,” despite all the evidence to the contrary, like that people make TikToks based on forcing gig workers to dance for them or the many examples of white people call police on… and the like. As though if we don’t exploit the power-over, we don’t have it.
Power-over robs us of empathy. Can you picture being a servant? Wouldn’t you assume there to be a certain lack of empathy from your ‘master’ simply by virtue of the idea of servitude? You are now seen as simply a less human person by virtue of that role.
Is there any way around it? I don’t think so, because even a compassionate ‘master’ can never be fully trusted. Hierarchy is natural, but slavery and servitude are not; they are ultimately a byproduct of agriculture. We have been trained by wheat, as YNH says, and we have contorted ourselves in so many ways since then
In the U.S., landowning educated white men created a ‘blueprint for freedom for the people’ that excluded a majority of humans actually subject to the laws it enshrined. As a result, our kind of liberty has served as a model of inequity and even genocide.
If we want a world where there is freedom for any human, we can’t live in a world that condones, through laws or norms, command by violence. Someone will always be the slave when there are masters. Taking power-over leads us lose our empathy and start commanding people to do things that are only ‘good for ourselves’ – at the cost of our own humanity. Unpacking how we’ve taken that power and feeling the results within us is a process, but it’s the only path to trusting each other.