I Can’t Change Anyone
True power is not in our influence, but we're influential when we're in our truth.
This revised essay was originally shared on 9-20-21 with the SEHD at CU Denver as a Monday Morning Message.
“I can’t change anyone.”
What heresy in education! I say this to my students not for the thrill of provocation, but because it’s what I know. Over the past few years I’ve intimately learned how power-as-control is illusory power, but power-as-wholeness is the greatest liberating truth.
I can’t change anyone, and there’s hope in that.
As educators, we love to imagine ourselves as change agents. Certainly, the oft-cited thrill of the illuminated “lightbulb” makes us feel good. We did that. We changed that student, even if just for a moment. Our actions led to someone else’s gain. They appreciate us. What we did impacted someone else. We have influence. We have control.
When I ask people to define power, I often hear terms such as force, control, impact, authority, or influence. In my doctoral class on power and privilege, we consider abuses of power and self-empowerment, plus everything in between. But it’s hard to shake the idea of power as some sort of causal relationship. We’re in a academia, after all.
Certainly, we like to believe that our teaching and research will have some sort of influence in the world. Academics are rewarded for our impact, and our tenure depends on it. Faculty are evaluated based on our students’ perceptions of their learning, whether our ideas have sparked other ideas in the field, and according to how much our work is cited. People in a variety of fields are evaluated based on their efficacy. What did you produce? What’s your brand? How are you changing the field? The institution? How are you changing the world? Who would we be if not for our legacy? Influence makes us feel special. Powerful. And yet…
If power lies in our influence, then power lies outside of us.
When we determine our power according to the extent to which something changes from our action, then we give our power away. We presume our power is only made evident by the effect of our cause, always searching and waiting for results to see whether we in fact have control. Depending on the context, the change we made might please or discourage us, thereby giving power to an external reaction or repercussion. We hand over our power by projecting it onto the outcome: the citations, the impact factor, a rejection, our students’ achievement, a friend’s agreement, the win, the loss, a subordinate’s frustrations, a leader’s conciliation, a policy change, a religious conversion, the company sales, a verdict, external accolades, someone’s disappointment, someone’s appreciation, their tears, their laughter, “where we go” when when we die. Someone’s judgement of us.
Here’s the catch: the more we externalize power, the more we try to control the external. It’s a vicious cycle of imbalanced power. Placing power outside of ourselves gives others the power to determine our worth, which in turn leads us to try to control how they treat us. Maybe we fawn. Maybe we acquiesce. Maybe we follow their rules. Maybe we fight. Maybe we pour out our blood, sweat, and tears. But by needing evidence of our influence, we’ll always be striving for something outside of us, the very thing we can’t actually control. Externalized power leads us to mistakenly assume we’re responsible for how someone else feels - or for how they treat us. If power is in the evidence of our influence, we’ll always be trying to live according to what someone else does or thinks, even if that someone is a whole system of someones. When we give power to the external, we’ll always be trying to control the external’s responses to us by what we do, even trying to control God.
Deferred power creates dysfunction because we can never fully control what happens, nor can we control others’ reception of us. It’s quite pretentious to believe that we can. Presuming power is in our influence has created the very power imbalances we’re trying to correct.
So what does it mean to not give power to an externality? We still can control ourselves, though, right? Right? Even the idea of self-control as power over ourselves makes us feel powerful:
“If I can intellectualize everything, that will keep me from facing the pain. I’ll control how I feel by not feeling at all.”
“When I get that job, then I will be successful. I am in control.”
“After I read more, I won’t feel embarrassed about looking ignorant again. I’ll control the shame by fixing myself. ”
“I’ll just thoroughly explain or act really nice and accommodating, and then I can control my experience.”
“I’ll suppress my anger because it’s not good to be angry. I’ll learn to control it.”
“If I feel guilty enough, then I won’t do that harmful thing again. Plus I won't have to feel the deep pain of what happened. I can control me by rejecting me.”
This version of self-control is no different from presuming our power lies in our influence. It’s still deferred power because there’s still a desired outcome: Our body’s compliance. Anticipated responses. Cause and effect. Do this and see change. There’s still a sense of power-over based on our own evaluations of what should be. It’s still pretentious. In fact, in a paradigm of power-over, we give away our power to presumptions of reality, not reality itself. In this paradigm, we neglect the present truth, ever reaching and searching and yearning. Never truly being. In this paradigm, we give away our power to illusory tomorrows, instead of grounding ourselves in evidentiary todays. We give it away to what someone else says, instead of to who we are. In other words, power-as-control is a scam.
What if we released ourselves from attachments to outcomes?
What if being in our whole truth, regardless of what happens next, is our power?
What if we defined power by the extent to which we have drawn boundaries around who we are, what we know, how we feel, what we’ve lived, what we need, what we are available for and unavailable for, what hurts us, what brings us joy, what gives us hope? What if power means the extent to which we express our full Word? Our demarcations of self may not enact the results we imagined, perhaps not even any change we can see. On the other hand, perhaps the whole of our truth gives rise to great transformation. But the goal of living one’s truth is not to witness our influence. The goal is to be who we are. Then, we are in our power.
Certainly, not everyone experiences the same response for living in their truth, for living in their power. Just ask trans and nonbinary people. Ask Black people about driving while Black. Ask people of a non-Christian faith who wear head coverings. Ask women who come forward about their sexual assault. Ask disabled students who tell their professor they need him to change his instruction. These groups must have true power, the power of their truth, or The Empire wouldn’t feel so threatened by them. They have the capacity to influence.
All kinds of intersecting systems socialize people into thinking they have to be a certain way. So we learn that to survive, we have to reject the parts of us that are socially unacceptable. As author, poet, and activist Alok Vaid-Menon says:
We [trans and nonbinary people] are actually the most honest. We’re tracing the root. Where do these ideas of manhood and womanhood come from? They come from a binary structure, and so that’s why people like me who are visibly gender nonconforming who are both feminine and masculine and none of the above, we experience the brunt of all of these collective fantasies that were created, that are killing other people, that are also killing us, it just looks different.
Don’t show up for me because you want to protect me or you want to help me. I don’t need your help. I have an unshakeable and irrevocable sense of who I am because I am divine. I come from people who were exterminated and targeted by colonists because the gender binary was superimposed on Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color by European colonists. And the reason that they targeted us was because they knew our power.
I want us to rephrase the conversation to, Are you ready to heal? I don’t think the majority of people are ready to heal, and that’s why they repress us as trans and gender-variant people because they’ve done this violence to themselves first. They’ve repressed their own femininity. They’ve repressed their own gender nonconformity. They’ve repressed their own ambivalence. They’ve repressed their own creativity. And so when they see us have the audacity to live a life without compromise…instead of saying, ‘Thank you for teaching me another way to live,’ they try to disappear us because they did that to themselves first.
If we actually believe people have a dignity for being not doing, there’s a kind of mercy and a kind of love that I have for everyone because we’ve only been conditioned into feeling that we can be loved if we can emulate some standards created by someone else, so people have not experienced my kind of love before.
People across millennia have conceptualized power-as-control in terms of heteronormative notions of gender, as if “masculinity” (action) is better than “femininity” (reception), as if doing is better than being. Controlling our actions provides a temporary comfort of certainty. Avoiding discomfort is simple: don’t surrender to what is or what will be; grasp with all your strength to changing something. Yet, when we consistently try to wield control over the outcomes by acting more than yielding or by doing more than being, then we participate in the damages of the patriarchy.
Many have a hard time understanding the Critical Race Theory tenet, the permanence of racism. Of course, positive outcomes are what white people know about race in the U.S. It’s hard to imagine the absence of our efficacy, which is precisely Bell’s (1992) point. He finds liberation in the truth: racism is because white supremacy is, and he can’t change white supremacy, only his own resistance against it. During the civil rights era, people wanted to change the white mind, rightly so. But Bell showed that there is hope in his own awakening to the fact that not only does power-as-control refuse to concede when faced with the truth, it also doubles down into the darkness of its delusion. Power is in Black truth.
Similarly, Staley (2018) embraces the impossibility of teaching in matters of gender and sexual diversity because binary logic maintains power-as-control in research endeavors. She writes:
[T]he work of disrupting cis-heteronormativity becomes a problem to be managed and controlled by research…What if, instead of aiming toward certainty, final answers, or narrative conclusion, we framed teachers’ negotiations of cis- heteronormativity (and other powerful systems) as a series of ongoing actions that sit in contradiction at times, are historically situated, and context specific? (291, 302)
To Staley, queering the curriculum means integrating opposites with a fundamental mechanism of movement, movement away from normalizing principles and out of stuck places. As such, perpetual actions that surrender to uncertainty integrate ancient notions of masculine and feminine energies. To queer is to become whole, to know power.
Similarly, ableing the curriculum means understanding that students’ power lies in their self-determination. Students do not need to be included only to experience expectations of assimilation as normalization (Slee, 1997). Disability does not need to be separate, nor secondary, within a hierarchy of one’s personhood, as Lydia X. Z. Brown explains in their critique of person-first language, like “person with Autism”:
In the autism community, many self-advocates and their allies prefer terminology such as "Autistic," "Autistic person," or "Autistic individual" because we understand autism as an inherent part of an individual's identity.
They continue their argument for self-determination in self-identification a few months later in this piece:
“Autistic” is another marker of identity. It is not inherently good, nor is it inherently bad. There may be aspects or consequences of my identity as an Autistic that are advantageous, useful, beneficial, or pleasant, and there may be aspects or consequences of my identity as an Autistic that are disadvantangeous, useless, detrimental, or unpleasant. But I am Autistic. I am also East Asian, Chinese, U.S. American, a person of faith, leftist, and genderqueer.
Disabled people are powerful in their whole being.
Accompaniment
Instead of life changers, what if educators saw ourselves as simply companions on the journey of being? As expectant mothers or accompanists? Interdisciplinary curators? Morning stars? What if teaching means:
We impose our truths at the extent to which a gardener plants a seed; certainly a disruption to the soil’s former way of being, though the engagement between the two is rich with potential. The gardener’s faith has no certainty in the events to follow, no control over how the elements will receive the seed. However, the simple act indicates the gardener’s expression of trust in movement across relationships: her hand, the seed, the elements, and the mystery.
Want to be an advocate toward social change? Here’s what I tell myself:
Don’t confuse control with agency. Control relies on something external to prove your power. Agency requires the enactment of truth. Support self-liberation and start with yourself. You’re nobody’s guerilla, but you can revolutionize you to eradicate your dangers of delusion. Go take a hard look in the mirror so you can save yourself from any hidden righteousness, the façade for your deepest insecurities. The only crown for exceptionalism is seduction’s whisper.
Then get out of the way so others can run from the burning house. According to your true availability, support affirming spaces, like Black independent schools, LGBTQ+ nightclubs, therapy centers, or the Indigenous Environmental Network. Excuse students from sessions when they don’t need to pay tuition to be retraumatized learning about what they live every day, unless they want to stay and self-express. For every policy in place, offer initiatives for healing.
The Empire exists to save no one, including the empire warring within your soul.
You are a whole being, Amy, made of inner truth, neither right nor wrong, only one who discerns. Don’t wait around for your beloveds to see the patriarchy’s damage, and stop protecting men from their weaknesses. Instead, plant your being in your supreme worthiness. Set boundaries. Speak your truth, and leave it at that. You may never know the extent of your truth’s ripple, so surrender to the possibilities with open palms. Remember the freedom you feel when you can love your shadow.
Celebrate with those brave enough to self-liberate by integrating the whole of themselves. Show compassion when they finally face and welcome all of the Versions of Self they think aren’t supposed to exist, those willing to experience the discomfort of stepping out of deception and into the light, real power. Protect yourself from anyone who can’t.
In her glory, Anzaldúa (1987) says: “I change myself, I change the world.” She integrates all the borders of herself into her wholeness, rejecting societal messages that wanted to control her truth and dim her light. During a time of incredible loss, chaos, and uncertainty, this sentiment anchors me. The light of wholeness liberates. This is power.
References
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera The new Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Slee, R. (1997). Inclusion or assimilation? Sociological explorations of the foundations theories of special education. The Journal of Educational Foundations, 11(1), 55-72.
Staley, S. (2018). On getting stuck: negotiating stuck places in and beyond gender and sexual diversity-focused educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 88 (3), 287-307.