Excellent piece, as per your usual. I love the focus on power and the many examples from your real life. This is such wonderful writing — facts buttressed by personal reality with the larger purpose of calling out the myriad ways power and white supremacy affect our society negatively. This works at many levels: personal, social, political.

On a personal note, my natural hair looks neither prototypically white, black, or any one ethnicity and is probably the result of the mix of different race/ethnicity I am. I’ve lost count of how many white women have tried to touch it over the years. The BIPOCS I’ve known — a wide range of black, brown, and some indigenous peoples — tend not to do this even though my hair often also looks different from theirs. Why is it that white women do this more?? It cannot be explained by ‘difference’ only…as you point out, there is a feature that is connected to embodying a dominant position in society…