ommunicate with the staff of an aboriginal-run conference center. I complained about this to my friend, activist Michel Gelobter, and he chided me: "Why are you surprised that oppressed communities exhibit serious dys-functions? These dysfunctions have to be recognized and dealt with; they reinforce and maintain oppression by diminishing the capacity of these communities to heal." The degenerative impacts of power-over are resolutely persistent.
I also noticed that within our microcosmic project team, we succeeded in re-creating the stuck relationships that characterized the macrocosm we were trying to change. The government leaders wanted to remain in control and to "fix" the aboriginal problem. The aboriginal leaders didn't want to be controlled or fixed or developed by anyone. And those of us who were consultants dispassionately kept ourselves apart from and above the situation. We all had our own different roles and powers and trajectories of self-realization, which never really moved and never really met. So we made no progress on the challenge that we had set out to address. (Only later, when these roles and power relations were forcefully restructured and ownership of the project was taken over by a local aboriginal community, did the initiative begin to move forward.)
In Canada, as in South Africa and Houston, I had been able to recognize the sound of power-to more easily than the sound of power-over because the former resonated more strongly with my own privileged experience. Then in 2004 I got a taste of the experience of the underside of power-over. My London partner Zaid Hassan and I were invited to facilitate a workshop in Michigan for a group of U.S. minority activists who were rethinking their strategy for achieving racial equity in light of the just-issued Supreme Court decision that sharply limited affirmative action.
I was unsettled even before the meeting started. Zaid is Muslim and I am Jewish, and on the plane ride he had sh