By: Natalie Johnson
We teach reading, writing, and arithmetic as foundational skills. But Christine E. Ohenewah argues there’s a fourth literacy we’re not teaching at all: power literacy, the ability to recognize and understand the power dynamics shaping every relationship, interaction, and decision in our lives.
As founder of The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation (ETF) and creator of the Power Pro Se methodology, Ohenewah has built her career around a simple but profound observation: most people are unconscious of the power dynamics they’re creating. They enter relationships, pursue careers, and make daily choices without understanding the invisible forces at work. The result is confusion, frustration, and a nagging sense that they’re not authoring their own lives.
Power literacy, as Ohenewah defines it, isn’t about dominating others or climbing hierarchies. It’s about seeing clearly. It’s the capacity to recognize when you’re responding to what you’re not rather than who you truly are, to understand the difference between power that’s claimed and power that’s granted, to analyze the intent and consequence behind your actions with the same precision a lawyer brings to examining evidence.
This framework emerged from Ohenewah’s training in criminal defense. At McGuireWoods LLP in Manhattan, she learned to deconstruct complex situations, identify the elements that mattered, and understand motivation at a granular level. But the real breakthrough came when she recognized that these same analytical tools could illuminate personal relationships and identity questions that seemed to exist in an entirely different domain.
Consider how criminal law analyzes mens rea, the guilty mind. Lawyers don’t simply ask what someone did; they ask what they intended, what they knew, and what they should have known. They examine the gap between action and consequence, between stated purpose and actual result. Ohenewah realized this type of analysis could transform how people understand their own behavior in relationships, careers, and everyday life.
Through ETF, she’s developing educational programs that teach this kind of thinking. Her Men’s Rea™ initiative applies legal frameworks to modern masculinity, asking participants to examine not just their actions but their underlying intent and the power dynamics they’re unconsciously creating. It’s a rigorous alternative to both hyper-masculine influencers promising dominance and surface-level gender discussions that avoid the deeper questions.
But power literacy extends far beyond gender dynamics. Ohenewah teaches at three universities, Hofstra, Iona, and St. Paul’s, where she helps students apply legal reasoning to understand social behavior and personal agency. The goal isn’t to turn everyone into lawyers but to give people the analytical tools to see their lives more clearly.
“The love you seek is already within you,” Ohenewah teaches. It’s a principle that sounds spiritual but carries a precise analytical meaning: much of what people seek externally, validation, purpose, power, becomes accessible when they develop the capacity to recognize what they already possess but haven’t yet claimed. Power literacy is the skill that makes that recognition possible.
This represents a significant departure from how we typically think about education. Traditional learning focuses on domain knowledge: history, science, literature, and mathematics. Ohenewah’s approach focuses on something more fundamental: the capacity to understand the dynamics shaping your own experience. It’s meta-education, learning how to see the structures within which all other learning takes place.
Her academic background spans research fellowships at Harvard and Oxford, degrees from Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, and years of legal practice. Yet the concept of power literacy didn’t emerge from any single discipline. It required integrating legal reasoning, sociological insight, and humanistic inquiry in ways that traditional academic structures don’t easily accommodate. That’s why Ohenewah founded ETF as an independent institution, one designed specifically to develop and teach this integrative approach.
The practical applications are immediate and far-reaching. Power literacy helps people understand why relationships feel unbalanced, why career paths feel constraining, why decisions that looked clear in prospect become confusing in retrospect. It provides a framework for analyzing not just what happened but why it happened and what role you played in creating it. This kind of clarity is transformative because it converts vague discomfort into actionable understanding.
Ohenewah’s long-term vision is to make power literacy as fundamental to education as any traditional subject. She’s writing, teaching, building programs, and developing ETF as a global institution dedicated to this work. Her goal isn’t simply to add another skill to the curriculum but to change how we think about what education is for.
The argument she’s making is both simple and radical: if you don’t understand the power dynamics you’re creating, you’re not truly free to choose your path. You’re responding to forces you can’t see, enacting scripts you didn’t write, becoming what you are not. Power literacy is the antidote, the skill that makes genuine authorship of your own life possible.
In a world that often feels overwhelming in its complexity, Ohenewah offers something valuable: not simplification but clarity. Through ETF and her teaching, she’s demonstrating that the tools for understanding power already exist. They’re just not being taught where they’re needed most. That’s what she’s working to change.
