There’s a question that has been sitting with me because the more I think about it, the bigger it becomes. It starts with race, but it doesn’t end there. It moves into history, psychology, economics, culture, politics, human behavior, and ultimately the uncomfortable question of what people actually do when they possess enough power to act without fear of consequences. If the balance of power in the world suddenly shifted and Black people became the dominant social, political, economic, and cultural force on the planet, would we build something fundamentally different from what we have experienced, or would we eventually begin reproducing many of the same behaviors that we have spent generations criticizing?
That question sounds simple until you really sit with it. It forces us to look beyond the easy explanations and examine whether oppression is something that belongs to a particular group of people or whether oppressive behavior can emerge whenever human beings are placed inside systems that reward domination. There’s a tremendous difference between believing that an entire population is naturally inclined toward cruelty and understanding how institutions, wealth, political influence, cultural conditioning, and generations of privilege can shape behavior. One explanation points toward biology and inherent character. The other forces us to examine history, incentives, circumstances, and choices.
I’ve lived long enough to understand that people can talk about morality all day long, but circumstances have a way of revealing what conversation can conceal. Give somebody nothing and you learn one thing about them. Give that same person wealth, status, political influence, institutional protection, and the ability to make decisions affecting millions of people, and you may discover another side of that person entirely. Power doesn’t automatically make somebody evil, but unchecked power can remove the barriers that previously prevented a person from acting on their worst impulses. That’s why the real issue isn’t simply who possesses power. The real issue is what happens when power is concentrated, protected, and passed from generation to generation without meaningful accountability.
That’s also why I don’t want this conversation reduced to the childish question of which race is “good” and which race is “bad.” That’s too easy, and frankly, it doesn’t take us anywhere. The deeper question is what happens to any people who acquire overwhelming power and eventually convince themselves that their position gives them permission to dominate everyone beneath them. History has shown us enough examples to understand that oppression can wear different faces, speak different languages, carry different flags, and operate under different political systems. The appearance changes, but the underlying machinery of domination can remain remarkably familiar.
And here’s where I have to challenge my own people just as hard as I challenge anybody else: if we ever acquire the kind of power that we say we want, we had better be prepared to answer what we intend to do with it. Are we trying to reverse the hierarchy, or are we trying to destroy the very idea of a hierarchy built upon human domination? Are we dreaming about becoming the new people at the top, or are we imagining a world where nobody gets to build a throne on somebody else’s suffering? Those are two completely different dreams, and the distinction between them may determine whether the next chapter of our history becomes liberation or simply another version of the same old story.
POWER DOESN’T HAVE TO CHANGE YOU TO REVEAL YOU
I’ve learned that people often talk about power as though it’s simply something you possess, but I don’t see it that way. Power is also an environment. It changes what people can get away with, who has to listen, who gets believed, who gets protected when something goes wrong, and who gets another opportunity after making a mistake. It changes the consequences attached to failure. It changes the expectations placed upon success. Over time, those differences can become so normal that the people benefiting from them may no longer recognize them as privilege at all.
That’s one of the most dangerous things about power. The person sitting comfortably inside a system may sincerely believe that the system is fair because the system has been fair to them. Meanwhile, somebody standing outside that same system may experience every locked door, every invisible barrier, every assumption, and every missed opportunity. Two people can live in the same country, attend the same institutions, and technically possess the same legal rights while experiencing completely different realities. Neither person necessarily understands why the other is so angry because they are looking at the same structure from completely different positions within it.
That’s why I’ve never been impressed by the argument that says, “I personally didn’t do anything.” Maybe you didn’t. But history doesn’t stop operating because an individual person didn’t personally commit every act that produced the world they inherited. The bigger question is whether you recognize what the system handed you and what it denied somebody else. There’s a difference between personal guilt and historical inheritance, and if we’re mature enough, we should be able to discuss both without immediately turning the conversation into a personal attack.
Imagine somebody robs a bank, disappears, and leaves the money behind for somebody else. The second person didn’t hold the weapon, but if they knowingly keep spending the stolen money, there’s an ethical problem that can’t simply be erased by saying, “I didn’t rob the bank.” The analogy isn’t about accusing every individual of personally committing every crime in history. It’s about recognizing that benefits can survive long after the original act has disappeared from living memory. Wealth can be inherited. Land can be inherited. Connections can be inherited. Educational opportunities can be inherited. Social confidence can be inherited. Even the expectation that somebody deserves to succeed can be inherited.
The opposite can also be inherited. Poverty can be inherited. Distrust can be inherited. Displacement can be inherited. Trauma can be inherited. The belief that you aren’t supposed to succeed can be inherited. The belief that another culture is inherently superior can be inherited. That’s why liberation isn’t simply about getting money or changing who occupies a political office. Sometimes liberation requires recovering the ability to see yourself without somebody else’s approval.
THE MOST DANGEROUS OPPRESSION CAN BECOME INTERNAL
There comes a point where oppression no longer needs to stand directly in front of you because you’ve already been trained to carry some version of it inside yourself. That’s when things become much more complicated. A people can begin policing themselves. They can ridicule their own accomplishments, attack members of their own community for becoming too independent, imitate the values of the very system they claim to oppose, and spend enormous amounts of energy fighting one another while barely questioning the structure surrounding them.
That’s one of the great tragedies of a divided people. You don’t always have to defeat everybody when you can convince them to fight among themselves. You don’t always have to silence everybody when you can get them arguing endlessly over identity, status, geography, class, appearance, politics, religion, relationships, and personal differences. A community can lose tremendous energy fighting internal battles while the larger economic and political questions remain untouched.
And I’ve seen enough of life to understand that not everybody who looks like you is automatically your ally. That’s a difficult lesson, but it’s an important one. Shared appearance doesn’t guarantee shared values. Shared ancestry doesn’t guarantee shared loyalty. Shared language doesn’t guarantee shared intentions. Sometimes the person who looks the most familiar can be the person who understands exactly how to manipulate your trust.
That doesn’t mean we should become paranoid. It means we should become discerning. There’s a major difference between paranoia and discernment. Paranoia assumes that everybody is against you. Discernment watches behavior, recognizes patterns, and makes decisions based upon what those patterns reveal. I’ve learned to pay attention to what people do after the smiles disappear, after the compliments stop, after the favors run out, and especially after you establish a boundary. Those moments can reveal what a relationship was actually built upon.
A person who only respects you when you’re useful doesn’t necessarily respect you. A person who only supports you while you remain beneath them isn’t necessarily supporting you. A person who celebrates your success only when they can benefit from it may not actually be celebrating you. Sometimes the moment you stop being manageable is the moment people reveal how they really feel about you.
SO WHAT WOULD WE DO IF WE HAD THE POWER?
Now we arrive at the question that started this entire conversation. If Black people suddenly became the dominant social, political, economic, and cultural force in the world, would we behave differently?
My answer is that I hope we would, but hope isn’t enough. If we’re serious about building something different, we need more than emotional certainty that we would somehow be better. We need structures that make accountability possible even when the people in charge are our own people. We need institutions designed to prevent the concentration of power from becoming permanent. We need education that teaches history without turning history into a permanent excuse for hatred. We need economic systems that allow communities to build and retain wealth rather than constantly exporting resources and importing everything they need. We need political leadership that understands public office isn’t a personal throne. We need media that doesn’t require people to destroy themselves for attention, and we need families that teach children confidence without teaching them superiority.
Most importantly, we need accountability. Because if we ever reach a position where we can do whatever we want to somebody else and nobody can stop us, that’s when the real test begins. It’s easy to preach justice while you’re powerless. It’s easy to demand fairness when you’re the person being mistreated. The harder test comes when you finally have the ability to mistreat somebody else and consciously decide not to.
That’s when morality becomes real. Anybody can talk about justice while standing outside the palace. The real question is what happens after you receive the keys. What happens when the people who once ignored your voice are now asking you for permission? What happens when the people who once had authority over you suddenly become dependent upon your decisions? What happens when you no longer have to answer to anybody? That’s where character stops being a slogan and becomes a test.
WE SHOULD WANT MORE THAN A CHANGE OF WHO SITS ON TOP
I don’t want a world where one group simply replaces another group at the top of the same rotten structure. That would only change the uniforms. The architecture of domination would remain intact.
If the old system says the powerful deserve everything and the powerless deserve whatever is left over, then changing the identity of the person sitting at the head of the table doesn’t solve the problem. If the new rulers begin exploiting workers, stripping resources from poorer nations, manipulating information, crushing dissent, and creating permanent classes of people who exist primarily to serve them, then what exactly did we accomplish? We would have changed the identity of the oppressor without changing oppression itself.
That’s why I believe the goal has to be bigger than revenge. Revenge may feel satisfying for a moment, especially when somebody has spent generations experiencing humiliation and injustice, but revenge is a terrible blueprint for civilization. Justice has to be larger than revenge because justice asks what kind of world we want to leave behind. Revenge asks how much pain we can return. Justice asks how we prevent the cycle from continuing.
And yes, I understand why people become angry. I understand why history produces rage. I understand why people who have been humiliated, exploited, lied to, displaced, and denied opportunities can eventually become exhausted with being told to simply move on. You can’t tell people to forget what shaped their present circumstances and then expect them to build a healthy future. Memory matters because it teaches us what can happen when power goes unchecked.
But there’s another trap waiting on the other side of that anger. If hatred becomes the foundation of our identity, then the people we hate still control us. They remain inside our heads, influencing our emotions, determining what we think about, determining how we react, and consuming energy that could otherwise be used to build something for ourselves.
I REFUSE TO LET SOMEBODY ELSE’S EVIL DEFINE MY SOUL
There’s something I’ve had to learn personally: I don’t have to hate somebody in order to protect myself from them. That distinction is important because too many people believe that rejecting somebody’s behavior requires them to become consumed by hatred toward the person or group responsible for it. I don’t believe that anymore. I can recognize destructive behavior without becoming destructive myself. I can recognize prejudice without becoming prejudiced. I can recognize manipulation without becoming manipulative. I can recognize historical injustice without spending the rest of my life poisoning my own spirit with resentment.
That doesn’t mean becoming passive. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It doesn’t mean smiling while somebody walks over you. It means understanding that boundaries can be stronger than hatred. Sometimes protecting yourself means walking away. Sometimes it means saying no. Sometimes it means refusing to participate. Sometimes it means building something independent rather than spending your entire life demanding that somebody else allow you inside their system.
That kind of freedom is powerful because it brings your attention back to where it belongs: your own development. The older I get, the less interested I become in convincing people to understand me and the more interested I become in making sure I understand myself. I know what I value. I know what I’m willing to tolerate. I know what I’m not willing to tolerate. I know the kind of environment where I can think clearly, create freely, and maintain my peace.
And I’ve learned that peace isn’t weakness. Sometimes peace is the result of finally understanding what deserves your energy and what doesn’t. You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. You don’t have to defend yourself against every accusation. You don’t have to convince somebody who has already decided that they don’t want to understand you. Sometimes the strongest response is to keep building while the noise continues somewhere behind you.
WE HAVE TO STOP WORSHIPPING WHAT DOESN’T SERVE US
One of the hardest things for any community is learning to separate admiration from dependency. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating another culture, buying a product, enjoying music, watching a movie, traveling somewhere, or learning from another people. Human beings have exchanged ideas, technologies, artistic traditions, foods, languages, and philosophies for thousands of years. Cultural exchange is part of being human. The problem begins when admiration turns into self-rejection.
That’s when you stop seeing value in yourself unless it has been stamped, approved, packaged, or validated somewhere else. That’s when another person’s accent sounds more intelligent than your own. That’s when another culture’s clothing looks sophisticated while your own traditions are considered backward. That’s when you begin believing that success requires distance from your own people rather than investment in them.
A community that constantly consumes without building eventually becomes dependent. A community that constantly celebrates celebrities while ignoring entrepreneurs, farmers, engineers, teachers, builders, scientists, artists, and small-business owners eventually develops a distorted understanding of success. A community that teaches children to become consumers before teaching them how to become creators will always remain vulnerable to somebody else’s economy.
I don’t want Black people simply buying more. I want us building more. I don’t want us simply complaining about representation. I want us owning more of the platforms where representation happens. I don’t want us simply asking for opportunities. I want us creating institutions where opportunities exist because we built them. That’s a different mentality, and it requires a different definition of success.
THE WORLD DOESN’T NEED ANOTHER MASTER
Here’s where I believe the conversation has to mature. We shouldn’t be fighting merely to become the next group that gets to exploit everybody else. We should be fighting for enough power that nobody can exploit us again. Those aren’t the same objective, and confusing them could produce another disaster while making us believe we’ve achieved liberation.
There’s a difference between domination and self-determination. Domination says, “I need you beneath me so I can feel powerful.” Self-determination says, “I need the freedom to build, protect, educate, create, prosper, and determine my own future.” One requires somebody else to lose. The other requires us to become capable.
That’s why building matters. Ownership matters. Education matters. Healthy families matter. Economic independence matters. Cultural confidence matters. Political awareness matters. Spiritual discipline matters. None of these things are as emotionally satisfying as simply identifying an enemy, but they are much more powerful in the long run because they create something that cannot be taken away simply because somebody else changes the rules.
Because if you give a psychologically wounded people tremendous power without addressing the wounds, those wounds can eventually become policy. That’s the part nobody wants to discuss. You can liberate somebody physically and still leave them mentally dependent. You can put money in somebody’s pocket and still leave them psychologically subordinate. You can put somebody in political office and still have them governing according to somebody else’s interests.
Freedom has to exist inside the person before it can become stable inside the institution.
POWER IS THE TEST, NOT THE PRIZE
So, would we behave differently if the power shifted tomorrow? I believe some of us would, and I also believe some of us wouldn’t. That’s the honest answer. There are compassionate people and cruel people in every population. There are courageous people and cowardly people. There are people who will stand up for justice even when it costs them something, and there are people who will defend injustice because injustice pays their bills. There are people who will sell out their own community for access to somebody else’s table, and there are people who will walk away from comfort because their conscience won’t allow them to participate.
That’s human nature, but human nature doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Systems can reward certain behaviors and punish others. Institutions can normalize cruelty. Cultures can teach superiority. Families can pass down prejudice. Governments can create incentives for exploitation. Media can normalize stereotypes. Economic structures can make greed appear rational. Education can either liberate the mind or train it to accept somebody else’s version of reality.
That means we have more responsibility than simply saying, “People are just like that.” People are shaped. People are taught. People adapt. People imitate. People resist. And people choose. That last word matters because even when the system is powerful, the individual still encounters moments where a decision has to be made.
The question becomes what we choose when we finally have options. What do we choose when we can retaliate? What do we choose when nobody can stop us? What do we choose when the same people who once had power over us are suddenly asking us for mercy? What do we choose when our economic success depends upon exploiting somebody weaker? What do we choose when telling the truth could cost us money? Those choices are where character becomes visible.
LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS, BUT TEST THEM WITH WISDOM
I’ve become much more serious about listening to my instincts as I’ve gotten older. There have been situations where something inside me told me that something wasn’t right long before the evidence became obvious. Then, years later, the behavior eventually caught up with the feeling I had at the beginning. That experience taught me something valuable: don’t ignore patterns simply because you desperately want a particular person to be good.
We sometimes become attached to the version of people we hope they are. We remember the good moments. We explain away the warning signs. We make excuses. We tell ourselves that somebody would never do that to us. Then reality eventually introduces itself, and suddenly we’re shocked by behavior that had been announcing itself for years.
Discernment doesn’t mean assuming the worst about everyone. It means refusing to ignore what people repeatedly show you. Watch the behavior. Watch the incentives. Watch who benefits. Watch who pays. Watch who gets protected. Watch who gets blamed. Watch what happens when somebody asks uncomfortable questions. Watch what happens when somebody establishes a boundary. Those observations can tell you more than a thousand speeches.
And this applies to individuals, communities, institutions, governments, and entire civilizations. History isn’t simply something sitting inside textbooks. History is the accumulated record of what human beings have repeatedly chosen to do when they possessed certain opportunities and incentives. If we want a different future, then we have to understand those patterns well enough to recognize them before we repeat them.
THE REAL RESET HAS TO BEGIN INSIDE US
Maybe the greatest reset isn’t waiting for some dramatic change in global power. Maybe the first reset has to happen inside our thinking. We have to stop confusing proximity to power with power itself. We have to stop believing that wearing expensive clothes automatically means we’ve succeeded. We have to stop measuring ourselves through somebody else’s standards. We have to stop allowing entertainment to become our education. We have to stop allowing consumerism to become our identity. We have to stop fighting one another over scraps while ignoring the larger economic and political picture.
And we have to stop assuming that unity means agreeing with everybody. Unity doesn’t require blindness. Unity requires a shared understanding of what we’re trying to protect and build. I can disagree with you and still understand that we have a common interest in seeing our children educated, our communities safe, our businesses thriving, our elders respected, our families stable, and our people psychologically free.
That’s mature unity. It doesn’t require everyone to think exactly like me. It requires people to understand that disagreement doesn’t automatically make somebody an enemy. A strong community should be able to survive internal debate without destroying itself. A strong culture should be able to examine itself without collapsing into self-hatred. A strong people should be able to acknowledge its failures without surrendering its dignity.
I’M NOT INTERESTED IN BECOMING THE THING I FOUGHT AGAINST
After all these years, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: I don’t want to spend my life becoming a mirror image of what I oppose. If I criticize arrogance, I don’t want to become arrogant. If I criticize cruelty, I don’t want to become cruel. If I criticize exploitation, I don’t want to become an exploiter. If I criticize racism, I don’t want to build my identity around racial hatred. If I criticize domination, I don’t want domination to become my definition of success.
That’s because there’s something more important than winning a historical argument. There’s the question of what happens to your soul while you’re fighting the battle. I can be angry and still think. I can be passionate and still have discipline. I can remember history without becoming imprisoned by it. I can protect myself without hating everybody. I can reject somebody’s ideology without believing that every individual connected to that ideology is identical.
That’s where I want my mind to remain. I don’t want somebody else’s behavior to determine the kind of person I become. I don’t want somebody else’s prejudice to dictate whether I remain capable of love. I don’t want somebody else’s cruelty to convince me that cruelty is the only language that works. I don’t want somebody else’s hatred to become the foundation of my identity.
THE QUESTION WE SHOULD ALL BE ASKING
So I’m going to bring this back to the question that started everything. If the balance of power suddenly shifted tomorrow, would we behave differently? I hope we would, but I don’t think hope is enough. We need preparation. We need self-examination. We need institutions that distribute power rather than concentrate it. We need economic independence. We need education that teaches people how to think rather than simply what to think. We need cultural confidence without cultural arrogance. We need justice without revenge. We need memory without becoming prisoners of the past. And above all, we need enough self-awareness to recognize that becoming powerful doesn’t automatically make us righteous.
Power is a test because it gives you choices. Power is a temptation because it gives you opportunities to act without immediate consequences. Power is a mirror because eventually it reveals what you’re willing to do when nobody can stop you. That’s why I don’t want merely to see the people who have been on the bottom suddenly standing on top while somebody else gets pushed underneath them. I want to see the entire concept of building society around permanent winners and permanent losers challenged at its foundation.
Because if we ever receive the opportunity to rebuild, the question won’t simply be whether we can finally get our hands on the wheel. The question will be whether we know where we’re driving. It’s one thing to finally possess the authority to determine your own direction. It’s another thing entirely to possess the wisdom required to use that authority without recreating the same destructive patterns you once condemned.
I’ve lived long enough to know that I’m not going to solve every contradiction in the world. I’m not going to see every historical wound healed, and I’m not going to watch every unjust institution disappear before my time is finished. But I can control what I contribute. I can control whether I become bitter or wiser. I can control whether I repeat the destructive behavior I criticize or demonstrate another way. That’s where my responsibility begins, and that’s where yours begins too.
I don’t need everybody to agree with me. I don’t even need everybody to like me. What I need is the freedom to examine what I see, question what I’m told, and speak honestly about what experience has taught me. If better evidence changes my understanding, then I’m willing to change. But I’m not going to surrender my ability to think simply because somebody becomes uncomfortable with the direction of my questions. The purpose of honest thinking isn’t to make everybody comfortable. Sometimes the purpose is to make us uncomfortable enough to finally examine ourselves.
And I’m especially not interested in teaching the next generation that somebody else’s humanity is worth less than theirs. That kind of thinking is the same poison that has damaged humanity throughout history, regardless of who holds the whip, the weapon, the money, or the political office. We should be teaching our children that their lives have value without teaching them that somebody else’s life has less value. We should be teaching them how to recognize injustice without teaching them to become unjust.
Maybe that’s the real answer to the question. If the power ever shifts, we shouldn’t simply ask whether we’re capable of becoming the next oppressors. We should ask whether we’re capable of becoming something better than the systems that oppressed us. That’s a much harder challenge because it requires more than anger. It requires discipline, vision, courage, education, economic development, cultural confidence, institutional strength, and the willingness to look honestly at ourselves.
So if the day ever comes when we finally have enough power to determine our own direction, I hope we remember what powerlessness felt like. I hope we remember what it felt like to have somebody else make decisions over our lives, what it felt like to be ignored, stereotyped, underestimated, exploited, or treated as though our dreams were somehow less important. But I also hope we use those memories not to create another empire of domination, but to build something strong enough that our people can finally stand upright without needing anybody else to kneel.
That’s the kind of power I want. Not power over people, but power over our own destiny. Not domination, but self-determination. Not revenge, but justice. Not another throne, but a foundation strong enough that our children won’t need to spend their lives fighting to prove that they deserve a place in the world. That’s the conversation I believe we need to have, because changing who sits at the top means very little if we never question the structure that keeps somebody underneath.
And maybe that’s the question that should stay with all of us long after this article ends: If the power really did become ours tomorrow, would we finally build something different, or would we simply become better at doing the same old thing?
