#86: where do you see power in your home?

a noticing practice

Jun 08, 2025

Good morning,

Prior to getting married, our premarital counselor asked my partner and me a deceptively simple question that has never left me: What was dinnertime like in your childhood home?

The point of the exercise was to help us understand each other and our respective family cultures better, before joining forces to create a new one.

How would you answer?

When you were a child, did your family eat together at the table? On the couch in front of the TV? In shifts? Did you eat alone? In your room? Was dinner fresh? Frozen? Takeout? Canned? Cooked by a parent? A grandparent? A sibling? You?

I think the reason the question has stayed with me over all these years is because while it’s easy to box into a simple reflection on culture or class, examining a simple meal routine actually opens up insight into so much more:

How time is structured
How emotions move in a room
How space is or isn’t held
How care is distributed—or withheld
Who holds responsibility and power

I’ve had to think about similar things in my event design or community engagement work over the years, but I totally stopped thinking about it at home. But the power part, especially now that I hold so much as a parent, is fascinating. We rarely talk about power dynamics within the home. Yet power is one of the most invisible and influential forces in any environment—whether at home, at work, or in a relationship. Our access to power often becomes the defining motivator for our choices in life, love and work. Is it possible our first site of education in power is our most overlooked?

Home as a Site of Power & Resistance

If you read last month’s essay on viewing Home as a “care studio,” consider today our first class together in the series, where we explore the design, labor, and emotion embedded in the domestic spaces that shape us. Here are some notes from Module 1: Home as a Site of Power & Resistance.

Line drawing of a two-story Edwardian-style house with bay windows, a gabled roof, and a covered front porch.

I. What do we inherit in our homes?

After renting small apartments for most of my adult life, we recently became homeowners of a 112 year old Edwardian—a complicated privilege and responsibility. In the Bay Area, old homes are part of a complex history of wealth-seeking and climate-battling. Edwardian architecture, which emerged in the early 1900s, marked a quieter, more practical response to the ornate Victorian style that preceded it. While Victorian homes—especially in San Francisco—are known for their decorative trim, turrets, and more segmented interiors, Edwardians featured simpler facades and more open layouts. Larger living and dining rooms signaled a shift toward day-to-day livability, appealing to a growing middle class navigating modern domestic life. Still, San Francisco in 1912 was a place where white homeownership was subsidized through government policy, Black families were redlined out of these neighborhoods for decades and Asian families continued to face displacement and racism. After a city-destroying 1906 earthquake, what got rebuilt and for whom was not politically neutral.

When we moved in, I couldn’t help but wonder: What was this house originally designed for? What have these walls witnessed? And what kind of home am I building inside it now, in an era of wild economic volatility, climate change and rapid technological acceleration?

Making a home, I realized, includes basic domestic chores but also tremendous cultural choices—raising a child, hosting guests, managing space—which is to make a thousand small decisions that signal who belongs, what’s safe, and how much power I’m willing to share.

II. Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) - bell hooks

I decided to pull from a few different disciplines to try to understand how home can be a site of power. At the end of this essay is a list of readings. But if you only read one, let it be bell hooks’ incredible essay, Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) from 1990.

In it, she explains, in the simultaneously nuanced and direct way only bell hooks can, how Black women carved out spaces of love, dignity, and resistance within their homes, even under the most dehumanizing conditions.

She writes:

This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. This task of making a homeplace, of making home a community of resistance, has been shared by black women globally, especially black women in white supremacist societies.

My favorite part of the essay is a section in which she takes to task Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative, specifically a section in which he tells the story of his birth and how he never got to see his mother, an enslaved black woman who had to work 12 miles away from home during the day. Because she was a field hand and had to be at work by sunrise, she would only be able to see him at night, when she would walk all the way home to put him to bed and then leave before he woke up in the morning.

hooks’ critique:

After sharing this information, Douglass later says that he never enjoyed a mother’s “soothing presence, her tender and watchful care” so that he received the “tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Douglass surely intended to impress upon the consciousness of white readers that the cruelty of that system of racial domination which separated black families, black mothers from their children. Yet he does so by devaluing black womanhood, by not even registering the quality of the care that made his black mother travel those twelve miles to hold him in her arms. In the midst of a brutal racist system, which did not value black life she values the life of her child enough to resist that system, to come to him in the night, just to hold him.

The whole section made me cry, but especially:

Holding him in her arms, Douglass’s mother provided, if only for a short time, a space where this black child was not the subject of dehumanizing scorn and devaluation but was the recipient of a quality of care that should have enabled the adult Douglass to look back and reflect on the political choices of this black mother who resisted slave codes, risking her life, to care for her son. I want to suggest that devaluation of the role his mother played in his life is a dangerous oversight. Though Douglass is only one example, we are currently in a danger of forgetting the powerful role black women have played in constructing for us homeplaces that are the site for resistance.

This opened up everything for me. Of course we can’t compare the circumstances of slavery to the environments in which most of us get to mother today, but we can consider that any environment in which one mothers is a site for political choices. The way we approach the most mundane acts—making a bed, cleaning a kitchen, holding a child—can be politically and emotionally charged. Even the way an Indian-American woman like me, from a traditionally patriarchal society, chooses to raise a son, becomes a political act. And these acts are shaped by the systems we may be resisting… and the ones we unconsciously reproduce.

So, if homeplace is where care can become resistance, how do we begin to see the shape of power in our own homes?

III. A Noticing Prompt: Can you trace the flow of power?

Let’s do a small noticing practice to see if we can see power in the home.

When I was in journalism school, a reporting professor encouraged us to always look for the flow of power in a room, which can often be done by noticing: Which direction does information flow in a community? Who holds the power in the flow?

I think this can be applied to noticing power in any environment, built or natural or, like home, somewhere in between. For instance: We exert power when we decide who we feel comfortable hosting—and who we don’t. We exert power when we choose which rooms are for kids, which are for adults, and which stay closed. We exert it when we keep certain community or family members at a distance, not out of cruelty, but as a form of emotional self-protection. It might seem minor, but we even exert power when we install baby gates, not just for safety, but as a way to manage overwhelm and reinforce structure. I’m doing it now, juggling a toddler and a puppy who like to fight over toys without language. I exert power by managing space and setting boundaries—trying to keep everyone safe.

So here is a prompt for you →
How does power move in your home? Can you see it?

[Note: The point here is just to notice. Not judge or evaluate.]

If “power” feels abstract, start small. Every home has a structure—emotional, architectural, cultural. And that structure teaches us something. What, exactly, is it teaching?

Here is a small list to get you started:

Who cooks, and who chooses what’s cooked?
Who has keys to the house?
What kinds of locks are on which doors?
Who is expected to clean up after whom?
What’s the most private space in your home? Who gets to use it?
What kind of power do objects hold? (e.g., baby monitors, smart locks, family photos)
Who decides what stays on the fridge?
Who dictates the schedule?
The money?
The privacy rules?
Which rooms feel emotionally charged?
Who is invited in—and who is kept out?

Some of these details are common across homes because they simply mirror the safety and survival requirements of being human. But others might actually be more arbitrary—or loaded—than we realize.

What I’m realizing—both as a child of parents and a parent to a child—is that they shape how children understand the world, how emotional labor flows, and how power is granted, exercised, or withheld.

It may not mean we have to do anything different immediately, but perhaps we can at least name what we are doing as we are doing it. Noticing is how patterns emerge.

As I try in my own home, I’ve been noticing how many of these choices I make without thinking. But they add up to the building blocks of my entire posture toward other people.

And I know my kid is watching.

Jihii Jolly

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