November’s biggest stories have revealed not just what’s broken in this country, but also the complicated systems that obscure that damage. From Darren Wilson’s non-indictment in Ferguson, Missouri, to the horrific alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, to Bill Cosby’s long-delayed reckoning with multiple rape accusations—these tales all turn on a series of grotesque power imbalances. They are stories of certain bodies—individuals, groups, races, classes, genders, and institutions—that possess an excess of power and exert it with malevolent, often violent force, against weaker bodies.

They have offered us a clear and chilly view of how power works: How it is communicated to the public and how it is carefully manipulated by those who have it. How the powerful manage to play the victim and turn power into a slippery force that slides right off of them and briefly appears to stick to the very bodies that grievously lack it. This month’s stories have made this transfer of power obvious. Mighty figures and institutions have been described as vulnerable, while those they have harmed are made to seem monstrously huge and threatening.

The most obvious of these inversions became visible after a grand jury in Ferguson decided on Monday night to not indict Wilson for the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. As a white, armed police officer, Wilson had institutional, racial, and weaponized power over Brown, an unarmed black teenager. The system that processed the events included a predominantly white police force, a white prosecutor, and a predominantly white grand jury. Wilson was not made to even stand trial for taking Brown’s life.

But pay attention to the ways in which these imbalances got manipulated and seemingly reversed as the story unfolded. In Wilson’s testimony, it was the far less powerful Brown who was the physical threat, and Wilson who was the vulnerable party. Never mind the fact that Wilson was roughly the same height as Brown and that he had a gun and police authority and Brown had neither.

“I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” Wilson told the grand jury. After Wilson already had shot Brown, Wilson told the grand jury that the young, injured man, “looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Again, the wounded, weaponless man—who now had his hands in the air, according to Wilson—is the demonic force, imbued with a supernatural threat. Gene Demby pointed out on Twitter that this dynamic was recently examined in “the first systemic empirical investigation into superhumanization, the attribution of supernatural extrasensory, and magical mental and physical qualities to humans.” The study found that “White Americans superhumanize Black people relative to White people.”