You Think You Have Power. Do You?

What if most of what we call power is not actually power at all?

We often confuse power with confidence, charisma, visibility, status, access, representation, influence, or simply having a seat at the table. But none of those things necessarily tell us who can decide what happens, whose decisions become reality, or who can make other people adjust around them.

In this episode, Chisom Udeze takes apart the language of empowerment and builds a more demanding definition of power from the ground up. She explores the difference between agency and power, the systems that impose outcomes without consent, and five distinct ways power can be built.

The episode also asks the harder question that comes after acquiring power: what is it for? Because gaining power is not the same as changing the conditions that made power necessary in the first place.

You will leave with a practical Power Audit to help you identify where power currently sits in your own life, what is being decided for you, where your dependencies are, and what you may need to build next.

This is not a conversation about feeling powerful. It is about whether anything actually changes.

Transcript

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So power is the capacity to decide what happens and make that decision hold whether or not the people affected agreed to it. I do not mean the feeling of being capable or confident or charisma or the ability to command a room. Those things may help a person acquire power and sometimes they are mistaken for the evidence of power, but they are not power itself. the test is much more concrete. Does your decision become the outcome? Does what you decide actually shape what happens next? And this includes not just for you, but for other people who did not necessarily consent for you or to you to be the one deciding. That is the definition I am holding for how I think about power. And I want to be precise about its limits. At its sharpest, power becomes imposed power. So your actions or inactions becomes somebody else's reality, regardless of whether they agreed with you, chose you, trusted you, or had any meaningful way to resist the outcome. Governments have this kind of power, employers have it, courts have it, landlords have it. People who control capital have it. Parents have it over their children. Institutions of varying kinds have it as well. Systems have it. The outcomes of the systems like racism, sexism, ableism, colonialism, and white supremacist ideology all operate through it because they produce material consequences in people's lives, whether or not those people consent to the systems itself. So this is why I am not particularly interested in empowerment as a feeling. I am interested in how impactful your power is. Today I want to explore power in that sense. So, how to think about power, how to recognize it, where it comes from, how people build it, and what we are supposed to do with it once we have it. I think that one of the functions of this episode is that I wanted to define power so precisely that every episode after it can use power instead of just gesture at it. I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight's Wisdom. 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 colour 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, someone else may still control the salary band. You can protest a law, a legislation may still have the authority to pass it. You can speak up in a meeting and the person who controls the budget may still ignore you. And I think this distinction is necessary because so much of what gets marketed as empowerment is really agency. So speak up, take up space, know your words, ask for more, be confident, lean in to the things that you want, or manifest the world that you want for yourself, believing in yourself. I think a lot of that is very useful, but none of it tells me all you. Whether your decision can become the material outcome. So I think that when we talk about power, we need to start by asking much harder questions. Who controls the budget? Who owns the company? Who sets the law? Who can hire and who can fire? Who decides what gets funded, published, promoted, taught or ignored? Who can say no and survive the consequences of saying no? Who can change the rules? Who has enough leverage that other people must adjust around their decisions? That is where power becomes visible. Representation can matter, absolutely, but representation is not automatically power. Visibility can matter, but visibility is not automatically power. Access can matter, but access is also not automatically power. A seat at the table is important, but if everybody else at that table can overrule you, remove you, defund you. wait for you to leave and continue as before, then the seats may be symbolic rather than powerful. So here's a frame I want to offer. Whenever something claims to be building your power, ask a simple question. What can I decide now that I could not decide before? If the answer is nothing, be careful with the word and the sense that something is empowering you. As I've been working through the concept of power for how I bring it forth in a podcast conversation, I have been working with five broad tracks through which people and communities build power. I do not expect that these categories will remain untouched. I expect to sharpen them as the work develops and as my thinking progresses, but they are useful enough to begin with. The first is what I call the Inside track. This is power built within the existing architecture using the forms of legitimacy that the system already recognizes. So I'm thinking about wealth, ownership, equity, institutional office, legal authority, credentials, things like property, senior leadership, ~ political position, media distribution, and access to decision makers and capital. this inside track is instrumental, but it is not innocent. I mean, a billionaire has inside power. A union leader can have inside power as well. A minister at a religious institution or at a political institution also has inside power. So can a civil servant who understands how the budget actually moves. A media owner certainly has inside power, as well as a journalist whose work can become impossible for an institution to ignore. A person who understands the rules well enough to alter an outcome has power inside the architecture. Even if they did not design that architecture and may even fundamentally disagree with it. And it's important to also flag that there is a tension here because some of the power I will discuss when I talk about power involves using tools built by the very architecture that we may want to dismantle. So financial markets, property, institutional status, corporate~ structure, credentials, political office, and ownership of varying kinds. So using the tool does not cleanse its origins and at the same time refusing every compromised instrument can leave that instrument entirely in the hands of people who are perfectly comfortable using it against you. That tension is very real, and pretending otherwise does not make us more principled. It just makes us less serious. The second is the outside track. This is power built outside the dominant architecture. So it is built deliberately and in opposition to the dominant architecture. And it is built through alternative institutions, corporatives, independent media houses, for example, community organization, work worker owned businesses, movement infrastructure. Community land trusts, independent publishing, ~ alternative schools and other structures that do not depend entirely on the existing system granting any kind of permission. But again it's important to note that outside power is not automatically liberatory. Africana nationalism was also organized, collective, and institution building. It built schools, banks, cultural organizations and political structures outside institutions Africaners believed did not adequately serve them, and that infrastructure ultimately helped produce apartheid in South Africa. So I really do not want us falling into the lazy assumption that grassroots means good or that collective means just or that anti establishments means emancipatory. That is not always the case. So the better question is always power for what? liberation project aims, say broadly speaking, to reduce the number of people whose lives can be determined without their consent. A reactionary project aims, for example, to change who gets to determine and wield power on and over others. Even that distinction is not. Perfect because movements can begin with one intention and then become something else once they hold actual power. That is precisely why acquiring power does not end the ethical work. It begins another part of the work. The third is the invisible track, that is power built through opacity, through being difficult to see, counted, regulated, difficult to interrupt or difficult to extract from. Informal networks, trust networks, undocumented systems of exchange, private organizing, community knowledge and economic activity that does not move neatly. through formal institutions can all operate in this space. Hawala is one example. It's a trust-based network of brokers that have moved values across South Asia, West Asia, and parts of Africa for centuries without requiring a conventional bank transfer between sender and recipient. There are communities all over the world whose survival has depended on systems that were never fully legible to the state, and there can be real power in being difficult to map, difficult to seize, and difficult to surveil and also difficult to govern. But I also want to be careful not to romanticize that because for many people invisibility is not a strategy they chose. It is a consequence of being shut out. Informal networks can mean freedom from certain kind of control, but it can also mean no labor protection, No social safety nets, no pension, no legal recourse, no access to cheap credits and no institutional recognition. People can be invisible to taxation and also invisible to welfare, invisible to bureaucracy and also invisible to justice. so the invisible track has to hold two truths at once. Opacity can be chosen as power and invisibility can also be imposed through exclusion. Those are not the same thing and we should not collapse them into, you know, one romantic story. The fourth is the relational track. This is where I want to challenge the assumption that power must always begin with individual accumulation. In Ibo philosophy, the concept of Iguike holds that strength exists through numbers and relationship. Ubuntu across Southern Africa holds another expression of this idea I am because we am. There are also indigenous traditions in which land is not understood primarily as property held through title, but as relationship carrying obligation, reciprocity, and stewardship. This is important because much of the modern conversation about power is deeply individualized. How much money do you have? What do you own? How influential are you? What office can you hold? How many people follow you? What can you command? And I think that's very important. And for a lot of us, that is what is readily available. But the relational track asks a different question. What becomes possible because we are in relationship with one another? A neighbor who watches your kids so you can work, a community that shares information, a professional network that moves opportunity, a diaspora network that transparts capital, ~ knowledge and access across borders, a family that absorbs shocks collectively, a group that pools money but no individual member has enough to act alone. That is also power. and again I am not interested in inventing an innocent past. Pre-colonial African societies were not equality utopias. Age hierarchy existed, gender hierarchy existed, caste systems existed, slavery existed, violence of different kinds existed, and domination of course existed. So Igwebuike and Ubuntu are philosophical resources, not evidence of a past without power or oppression. I am interested in what they can teach us about forms of power that do not begin and end with individual possessions. The fifth is the withdrawal track, and that is power built through refusal, the decision to stop supplying something that another person, another institution or another systems needs from you. That could be your labor, your money, your attention, your votes, your legitimacy, your participation, your purchase, your expertise, your silence and your cooperation. The Montgomery bus boycott is the obvious historical example here, where black residents withdrew something the transit systems needed from them, their fares. They stopped participating for more than a year. And because their participation had material value, The withdrawal created leverage. that qualification is important here because refusal is not automatically power. An example of this is when more than 500 advertisers joined the stop hate for profit boycott. of Facebook in 2020, I believe, the financial damage remained limited because Facebook's revenue base was broad enough to absorb the withdrawal. So the question is not simply whether you can refuse. question is whether what you are withholding matters enough to alter the other side's options. And that leads me to what I think is one of the most useful questions in this episode. What does the thing I am trying to influence need from me? I'm gonna say that again. I think it's important that we ask when we're on the withdrawal

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what does the thing I am trying to influence need from me? Does it need my labor, my rent, my vote, my attention? My purchase, my silence, my participation, my expertise, my audience, or say my compliance or even my consent. Once you understand dependency, you begin to understand leverage. And I really do not think that withdrawal should only be about starving the thing that harms us. It should be about redirecting what we withdraw. If you stop giving your money to one company, where does that money go instead? If you stop subscribing to a publication that repeatedly dehumanizes people, which publication do you support? If you stop giving your attention to one platform, where do you move that attention? Power is not only about what we starve, it is also about what we choose to feed. There are also two other questions I'm also holding across all five tracks I have talked about, rather than treating them as separate tracks. The first is testimony. There is power in naming. Abolition movements used it. Civil rights movements understood it. Truth commissions to this day understand it. Journalists understand it. Whistleblowers leverage it and they understand it as well. Survivors understand it. Even authoritarian governments understand it as well, which is why controlling language and history and testimony and media is so often among the first priorities of a regime trying to consolidate control. Naming can withdraw legitimacy from something. It can make harm public. It can turn what looked like an isolated experience into evidence of a pattern. It can give language to people who knew something was happening but did not have a frame through which to understand it. That is why language matters so incredibly much to me. And that is why I call white terrorism white terrorism. Naming does not dismantle a system by itself, but you cannot seriously challenge something you have been trained not to see. the second question I'm holding is what I call the multiplier. Once you have power, what happens to it? Does it stop with you or does that power increase somebody else's ability to act? A person can run the insight trap that I spoke about perfectly. You know, they can build wealth, they can acquire ownership, they can hold institutional office, they can gain access, they can build a platform and accumulate influence, and they can still be the only person who meaningfully benefits. That person has power. I want to be precise about that. My argument though is simply that I do not think power should terminate with the person who acquires it. So we have to shift and share power. We have to do so by hiring, by investing, by sponsoring, by teaching, by funding, by sharing information, by sharing platforms, by making introductions where relevant, by creating ownerships or vessels through which people can earn, by moving capital, by passing knowledge from person to person, generation to generation. By changing the rules of engagement, by opening a door and critically, of course, leaving that door open. and then asking how can we control more of the building together? So the question is whether the person behind you can now do something they could not do before because of the power you have built. That is the multiplier. Power that only reproduces itself in one person may be successful accumulation. I do not think it is enough to call it liberation. And then there is of course the corruption problem because power corrupts. Not because every powerful person becomes evil, but because power changes the environment around you. People challenge you less. You receive more deference. your bad ideas encounter fewer obstacles. People become dependent on your approval. Your interpretation of events begins to carry more weight than somebody else's. Your preference becomes policy. Your inconvenience becomes somebody else's emergency. Over time, you can become increasingly insulated from the consequences of your own decisions. And that is how power corrupts. So acquiring power requires a parallel discipline. How will I know when my power has begun lying to me? How will I know when my power has become evil? Who can still tell you no? Who can tell you that you are wrong? Who can leave? Who has information that you do not control? Who can challenge your version of events without losing their income, status, access, or belonging? If the answer is nobody, you may have built power very successfully, but you may also have built the condition for corruption. So let me make this practical. I want to leave you with something I am calling a power audit. You can run it on your career, you can run it on your finances, you can run it on your relationships, on organizations, your community, or anywhere else where you are trying to understand who decides what happens. So start with the first question, what decisions can I currently make and make binding? Not what I am allowed to suggest or what I am invited to discuss. What can I actually decide? Can you decide where you live? Can you leave your job? Can you reject a client? Can you choose how your time is spent? Can you influence your salary? Can you decide where capital goes? Can you hire? Can you fire? Can you publish without permission? Can you walk away from a bad deal? Can you say no without catastrophic consequences? Write those decisions down. That is a part of your present power. Then ask the second question. Which decisions affecting my life are currently made by somebody else? Somebody else could be your employer, your landlord, a bank, immigration authorities, a partner, an investor, a publisher, an agent, a board, a government, a client, a family member, an algorithm. or an institution. Do not moralize it, just map it. the third question is what resources make their power over me possible? Is it the money? Is it the housing? Is it legal status? Is it information? Is it credentials? Is it the access that they have? Is it the distribution that they have? So think about publishing, for example. Is it child care? Is it health care? Is it Employment, is it capital? Is it social legitimacy? Is it a professional network? Or is it your fear of losing a sense of belonging? Once you identify that dependency, you can begin asking whether it can be reduced or replaced or diversified. Could it be collectively secured or could it be built for yourself?

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which track gives me the most realistic route to more power? Do you need inside power through money or through ownership or through credentials? Do you need it through, say, legal authority or institutional access? Do you need outside power by building something that does not depend on the existing gatekeeper? Do you need greater opacity or independence? Do you need relational power because you are trying to solve individually what only becomes possible collectively? Do you need withdrawal power? Because the leverage you have lies in something you can stop supplying. Listen, you do not need every form of power. You need the one that changes the constraints you are actually facing. The fifth question is the one I do not think should be postponed after success. And I think that question again is what will my power be used for? And you need to have a clear sense of this before the money, before the title, before the audience, even before the office, before the company, before the influence that you have, or before you secure that political position. You have to decide. If you become the person with the power to decide, what exactly are you going to decide? If you acquire capital, where will it be? If you employ people, what kind of people would you employ and what kind of workplace would they enter? if you control a platform whose voices become possible because you control that platform. If you own property, what kind of owner will you be? If people depend on you, what protections will exist against your worst day, the spots you have not considered, or your ego, your fear, or your appetite for control? If you control a media outlet, whose people do you give voices to? Which stories do you surface? Power needs a purpose before power starts to rewrite the person who holds it. So let me give you a small example of what I mean because I do not want this episode to remain entirely theoretical. Let's take financial power. People often hear those words and they imagine worth. I do not. The first form of financial power is often much smaller. if you are living from one salary payment to the next, a bad employer has significant power over you because losing that income immediately threatens your rent, your food, your childcare, your transport, and everything else that holds your life together. So where you can start is to start to build one month of expenses, then two months, then three months. You will not reach at this point, but something material has changed. You can survive a delayed payment. You can reject an exploitative client. You can leave a job before another one is perfectly lined up. You can absorb an unexpected bill without immediately going into expensive debt. Money has therefore changed the decisions available to you and that is financial power. this is also one of the definitions I am holding when I discuss power because it says that financial power begins when money gives you options, not merely obligations. The first stage is not abundance. Sometimes it is simply enough margin to be able to say no. And notice what happened there. We did not begin with manifestation. We did not begin with believing harder. We changed a material dependency by planning and building against a risk. That is what I mean by building power. So, one more thing, and I'll let you go soon. In much of my work, I run something I call the hostile pass. I take an argument that I like, and especially the one that I like, and I try to break it. I ask myself what is missing? Where are the loopholes? Whose experiences make this framework collapse? And what have I romanticized? What have I assumed? Where have I confused my own option with everybody else's reality? I interrogate where the evidence is thin And also where the idea becomes dangerous if somebody with very different intentions picks it up. I want you to do that with me in the conversations I have about power as well. When I talk about inside power, ask what it costs you to use tools built for somebody else's extraction. When I talk about outside power, ask whether the institution being built actually leads to liberation Or simply wants a different group on top. when I talk about invisible power, ask whether I am describing strategic opacity or romanticizing exclusion. when I talk about relational power, ask who carries the invisible label that makes the collective possible. when I talk about withdrawal power, ask whether what is being withdrawn actually matters enough to create leverage or whether we are confusing symbolic refusal with material consequence. And please challenge me. I do not say that as an exercise in false humility because screw being humble. I am smarter than a whip and I know it. I am very good at thinking and grappling with complicated things and complicated systems and pretending otherwise serves absolutely nobody. But confidence in my thinking does not make my thinking complete. I am human and I can only see the stretch available from where I stand. I do not wear every shoe, so I do not know where every shoe hurts. If the framework I build for power fails where you stand, then tell me where. If there is a form of power I have missed, please tell me. If something works differently in your cultural, political, financial, or institutional context, expand the frame and let's engage it together. Correction is not a collapse of serious thinking. It is part of serious thinking. Ongoing learning and correction are a great part of my own work, not evidence that the work is failing. So this is where I will leave it. To reiterate, power is not a feeling that you can do something. Power is the capacity to materially affect what happens. at its sharpest, it is the ability to make a decision hold even when the people affected did not consent to you being the one doing the deciding. Look for where that power sits. Look at what is being decided for you. Look at the dependency that makes that possible. Ask which form of power would actually change it. Then ask what you intend to do with that power once you have it. So that is where my thinking on power that I will share on this podcast begins. Not with whether you feel powerful, but with whether anything actually changes. This is Overnight's Wisdom. I am Chisom Udeze. Thanks for being here and see you next week.