Deconstructing Domination

It happened slowly, over time.

For over four years, I've been deconstructing whiteness and colonization in antiracist spaces. I began this work not just because of ideology but because of my story. I’m a Latin American woman, daughter of a matrilineal Indigenous tribe in Costa Rica, born into a body that reads white to the world.

Growing up, I wasn’t a stranger to racism I was a bystander. I remember people assuming my mother was my nanny because she is brown. I remember her stories of being stared at while breastfeeding me, of people’s confusion when she showed up at school events, of their visible relief when my white-presenting father arrived. These moments weren’t just microaggressions. They were clues pointing me on the direction of a larger social script, one that honored the performance of whiteness while silently erasing the women in my lineage.

So I entered this work from a complicated place: benefiting from a system that degraded the very women who birthed and raised me.

As I deepened my decolonial practice, I began to see how whiteness had become part of my mother’s worldview. Then I saw it in my grandmother. In my sisters. In my tias. It was everywhere. But something in me shifted when the word "whiteness" started to feel incomplete.

Because it was no longer just about racial identity.

It was about power. It was about how certain behaviors were deemed right, others wrong. It was about how control dressed up as virtue.

When I started looking through the lens of domination, I could see that it wasn't just a racial structure—it was a behavioral system. Domination became almost neutral, in a sense not emotionally, but analytically because it stopped being about who benefits and started being about how we relate. It became about patterns of control, performance, manipulation—about the ways we were all conditioned to perform dominance to secure belonging.

I saw this in myself. In my relationships. In my early conditioning. I began tracking my behaviors through what I now call the spectrum of domination—a range of responses we enact to secure power when what we really crave is connection.

And when I saw it clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

This shift changed everything, including my relationship to spiritual spaces. I began to withdraw from the “New Age” world not out of bitterness, but out of grief. I saw how these spaces became repackaged colonial Christianity with sprinkles of patriarchal capitalism. Where politics were deemed “low vibration.” Where grief and anger were treated as blocks to manifesting abundance. Where speaking of genocide was considered “bringing down the energy.”

In 2024, I attended events in Costa Rica just months after the escalation of violence in Palestine. No one spoke of it. The silence roared. While people set intentions for $10K months and ascension into 5D, I felt the weight of absence the collective dismissal of reality in service of spiritual performance.

It wasn’t neutrality. It was domination dressed as light.

Reading Healing Your Way Forward by Myisha T. Hill cracked something further open. I saw how whiteness wasn’t just an identity it was an addiction. A set of behaviors we’re all rewarded for performing. In order to survive systems of oppression, many of us learn to become oppressive ourselves. There’s no space for true belonging inside domination only roles, only masks.

Then I reread All About Love by bell hooks. Her words landed in my body. She showed me how, in childhood, I’d learned to silence parts of myself to gain validation. Over time, I trained my body to confuse validation with acceptance. To confuse performance with love.

Love, she reminded me, is a verb. Belonging, too.

Thinking love is a feeling, she said, is a slippery slope into domination.

And I began to ask: what does domination sound like? How does it feel in my body?

Sometimes it feels like defensiveness. Like lying to control someone’s perception of me. Like curating an identity to avoid being seen. Like performing competence instead of asking for care.

I began to notice the masks. The drag I put on to survive.

Liberation, it turns out, feels like death.

A death of the parts of me that existed to perform inside systems that taught me performance is safer than truth. It feels naked. Tender. And raw.

Because now, I can’t hide behind the mask I so carefully crafted to trick others into accepting me.

And even though it’s terrifying, I know this is the work.

This is how I return to belonging.