Power can take many forms. Numbers can be power: being part of the majority means your preferences are more likely to be treated as normal. Money can be power. Political positions can be power. Cultural influence—the ability to shape what people admire, believe, or consider acceptable—can also be power.
And the power we hold, or lack, can shape how we act and how we see ourselves.
When we talk about identity, we often focus on what a person believes or which community they belong to. But I think we also need to ask: what position does that identity give them in the society around them? Does it make people listen to them? Does it give them access to opportunities? Or does it mean they have to explain themselves before anyone takes them seriously?
In Penang, the history of the Peranakan Chinese helped me think about this. The Peranakan, also known as Baba-Nyonya, are descendants of early Chinese settlers whose communities developed through generations of life in Southeast Asia. In colonial Penang, influential Peranakan merchants and political leaders held positions that extended their influence beyond their own community.
What interests me here is that being part of a smaller community does not automatically mean having less power in every sense. Some wealthy families could hold considerable economic influence without belonging to the population majority. Their business relationships, social standing, and connections to colonial authorities gave them forms of power that numbers alone would not explain.
That does not mean everyone in the community shared those advantages. A wealthy merchant and a worker might share an ethnic background while occupying very different positions. Even within a family, the opportunities available to men and women could differ. Calling all of them “Chinese,” or even “Peranakan,” leaves much of that out.
This is why I think we need to look at identity in an intersectional way. The word can sound complicated, but the question behind it is fairly simple: how do the different parts of who we are work together to shape our position?
Our gender, economic status, religion, language, and ethnicity can each carry different implications. Someone might have financial security while facing religious discrimination. Someone might belong to the ethnic majority but have very little influence over decisions affecting their life. The same person can be listened to in one setting and dismissed in another.
Power also shapes what we feel comfortable doing. Are we comfortable disagreeing with someone? Do we expect our concerns to be taken seriously? Can we make a mistake without feeling that it will be used to judge our entire community? These everyday expectations can become part of our personality, even when we rarely think about where they came from.
Sometimes power is most invisible to the person who has it. When an advantage has always been there, it can feel like an ordinary feature of life. We might see our confidence as entirely our own, without noticing how often the people around us have given us reasons to feel confident.
To understand ourselves more carefully, I think we have to notice those conditions too. We can recognize the difficulties we face while also asking where life has been easier for us, and why.
So when you look at your own identity, where do you hold power? Where do you feel its absence? And which advantages have become so familiar that you no longer recognize them as advantages?
