Reflections on Power Literacy
Creative Counseling Blog
One of the most consistent reactions I get in the world has nothing to do with what I say.
It’s my look.
I’m a tall white guy with a fro. Sometimes there’s a headband. Sometimes it’s bright. Sometimes it’s colorful. And over the years, I’ve noticed something curious: I don’t get many strange looks from women. I don’t get many from people of color. But white men? Consistently. Confusion. Tight faces. A kind of silent why?
For a long time, I didn’t quite know what to make of that.
But recently, a small moment helped clarify it. I belong to a country club, and I shared an old photo of myself from years ago—wearing a pink, furry jacket. A moment of play, creativity, and self-expression from an earlier chapter of my life. The photo was taken down. Quietly. No explanation. Just gone.
That moment clicked something into place for me.
Power Literacy
In counseling, we talk a lot about emotional literacy—naming feelings, recognizing patterns, understanding internal states. But there’s another kind of literacy that often goes unnamed: power literacy. The ability to see who holds power, how it’s expressed, how it’s protected, and—importantly—how it’s relinquished.
Power literacy asks questions like:
Who gets to be flexible?
Who gets to be vulnerable?
Who is allowed to look foolish?
Who is punished for stepping outside the box?
I grew up in a lesbian household. My dad was around, but for twenty years my home was led by two women. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t always easy. But it gave me something invaluable: early exposure to power dynamics. Who’s in. Who’s out. Who has to adapt. Who can’t afford not to.
That upbringing gave me a kind of privilege—not social privilege, but perceptual privilege. I learned to notice how power moves quietly, often invisibly.
Invisible and Visible Identities
Much of power operates through invisible identity—the things we don’t have to announce, the assumptions made on our behalf.
And yet, as humans, we often try to make invisible identities visible:
A wedding ring
A flag patch on a backpack
An American flag flying in the back of a pickup truck
Brand symbols on our clothes or cars
These are forms of nonverbal communication, and ways for our invisible identities (sexual orientation, nationality, political, and socio-economic status) to become visible communication. They signal alignment, safety, identity, hierarchy. They quietly say, “You know where I stand.”
What I’ve come to realize is that my appearance disrupts that clarity—particularly for white men. It introduces ambiguity. And ambiguity is deeply uncomfortable in systems built on dominance, certainty, and rank.
A Lesson From Casting Rooms
My background is improv, comedy, and acting. This dynamic showed up clearly for me years ago when I lived in Chicago. I was doing on-camera auditions for commercials and sitcoms, and my agent at the time—a short, blonde, gay man, who was unapologetically direct, and worked in a world of quick visual, nonverbal communication, and stereotypes. He used to get furious with me about my look.
“I can’t send you out for anything but a crazy person with your hair like that,” he’d say.
“If you’d just cut your hair, I could send you out for so many more auditions.”
It became an ongoing battle.
In commercial and television casting, nonverbal communication is everything. A single image, a color, a silhouette—it all tells a story before a word is spoken. And my refusal to cut my hair meant I was opting out of a certain kind of power.
I was rewarded and punished accordingly.
The roles I booked were telling: the effeminate roller skater, the unpredictable outsider, the person you don’t quite trust, and can’t read the room. Even now, when I audition, I’m often cast as the thing you don’t want.
I did a commercial for Waymo—but I wasn’t the calm, future-forward driverless car. I was the Uber driver you’d never want to be stuck in a car with.
That’s power literacy, too.
The system wasn’t wrong. It was accurate. My look communicated something noncompliant. Something unreliably human. Something that refused to signal dominance, control, or safety through sameness.
Relinquishing Power Is Confusing—Especially to Men
As I was walking recently, hair extra long, headband bright and unapologetic, I noticed it again: the looks. And this time, I understood them differently.
It wasn’t judgment.
It was confusion.
Why would you give that up?
Why would you lower yourself?
Why wouldn’t you leverage what you’ve been given?
In many male-dominated spaces, power is treated like a scarce resource—something to grip tightly, protect aggressively, and never set down. Vulnerability feels like erosion. Humanness feels like risk.
But here’s the paradox: relinquishing power is powerful.
Women often understand this instinctively because they’ve had to. People from marginalized identities understand it because survival requires flexibility, humor, softness, code switching, and connection. White men—historically buffered from these realities—are often the last to learn this lesson.
And the white men I do connect with share something important: they’re comfortable being low-status. They can look foolish. They can be wrong. They know how to play the game—but they don’t need to live there. Their authenticity shows up in humility, curiosity, and play.
The Cost of Holding On
We live in a capitalist society that rewards dominance, productivity, and control—largely upheld by white male power structures. And we’re seeing what happens when those structures double down, then triple down, then isolate themselves further.
Power without connection becomes brittle.
Power without vulnerability becomes lonely.
Power without humanity collapses inward.
This is where aggression turns inward. Or outward. This is where we see violence, despair, and men who feel trapped by an identity they’re not allowed to soften.
The cracks in the armor have always been there. Everyone can see them. The danger is pretending they don’t exist.
Connection Over Power
My hope is simple.
That men begin to see the strength in loosening their grip.
That connection becomes more valuable than control.
That love, play, and inclusion feel less threatening.
Men deserve connection.
Men deserve to be loved.
Men deserve vulnerability without punishment.
There’s a moment at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy is desperately reaching for the cup (aka power) — lusting for power so much that he loses sight of how he is about to fall to his death. And the older, wiser voice says, “Junior… take my hand.”
That moment stays with me.
Maybe that’s what this is. An invitation. To shift back to what’s important. To take a hand. To choose relationship over power.
I believe there’s a wide range of ways to be human. You don’t have to fit the box to belong. You don’t have to armor up to be respected. And sometimes, the most radical act isn’t claiming power—but setting it down.
That, to me, is power literacy.
