Reactivity and Recoil: What Happens in the Body When We Are Called Up
Entering a Moment of Racial Charge
You know the moment. Someone names race in the room, or names something you just said, and the air changes. Your chest tightens. Your face gets hot. The room goes very quiet, or your own mind goes very loud.
That is a moment of racial charge. And we can feel it. Our bodies are receivers of energy, picking up on the charge all the time. Yet white folks are trained, intellectually, to remain unconscious of what our bodies already know. This creates friction between what the body registers and what the mind denies.
So what causes the charge? An energetic charge is created by friction, tension, and frenetic energy. The theory at the heart of Internal Social Justice (ISJ)™ is that the charge in these moments is created by racial tension embodied within the individuals present. I call this embodied racial tension, and it largely operates underneath our conscious mind.
How does embodied racial tension show up in the day-to-day lives of well-meaning white folks? And how does it manipulate us when we are faced with racial feedback? That is what I want to walk through with you here.
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Pockets of Potential and the Call Up
In the treatment of embodied racial tension, moments of racial charge are the landscape of our healing. I call them pockets of potential. Whether the potential is for harm or for healing, the choice is yours.
Pockets of potential are activations. They are the moments of racial charge that activate embodied racial tension. They happen when we are called up to a better way of being.
I offer “call up” as an improvement on call-out culture, and a positive departure from labeling feedback as a “call out” or a “call in.” A call up is quite literally an opportunity to do better. And what does “do better” mean in a moment of racial charge? It means employing conscious practices that shift us from the level of the problem, embodied racial tension, to the level of the solution.
Here is the difficulty. If embodied racial tension is truly the root of the problem, then we need to meet these pockets of potential with more conscious awareness than ever before. Yet we, as white folks, have been thoroughly conditioned to go more unconscious in exactly these moments.
Two Default Tendencies: Reactivity and Recoil
When racial charge or racial feedback activates embodied racial tension, very specific unconscious symptoms arise. They arise as reactivity or recoil.
Both are manifestations of fear and tension. Reactivity turns outward. Recoil turns inward. Both are unconscious default tendencies of embodied racial tension, and both arise from the sympathetic nervous system and the biochemistry of stress and fear. Reactivity shows up as fight or flight. Recoil shows up as freeze or appease.
For white folks encapsulated within white culture, we have neither been prepared for nor practiced at receiving racial feedback. So of course we have so little skill in receiving it. Of course we have remained unconscious of how this embodied tension activates in the face of it.
And what happens when we don’t tend to the racial tension that has built up in our bodies? It continues, through our reactivity and recoil, to cause harm in our relationships, both personal and professional.
But we can do something about it. Because embodied racial tension is unconscious, it only rises to the surface in a moment of racial charge. And when it is activated, we can feel it, know it, and ultimately do something about it. ISJ shifts our perspective on these moments from situations to avoid at all costs into moments of opportunity.
Let me show you what this looks like on the ground.
What Reactivity Looks Like
A few years ago I was co-teaching a continuing education weekend for acupuncturists. A white practitioner I’ll call Mark, fifteen years in practice and well loved by his patients, was presenting a classical herbal formula. He opened with a joke about unlocking “ancient Oriental secrets.” A few people laughed.
A Korean American practitioner in the second row, I’ll call her Jin, raised her hand. Calmly, she said: “The word Oriental has a colonial history. And framing this medicine as exotic secrets erases the people and the lineages who actually built it.”
The room went still. That stillness was the charge.
I watched it move through Mark’s body before a single word came out. His jaw set. His face flushed red from the collar up. He leaned forward over the podium. And then the words came fast. “I’ve studied in China. I have the deepest respect for this medicine. It’s literally in the name of our degrees.” He launched into a history of licensing titles. The explanation went on for several minutes. And then the line I have heard in some form a hundred times: “Honestly, if you’d brought that to me privately instead of in front of everyone, I could have heard it.”
That is reactivity. An explosion of energy turned outward. Anger, defensiveness, blame, and the unstoppable urge to explain yourself out of discomfort. Notice what it did to the room. Jin went quiet for the rest of the morning. She was now carrying two burdens: the original harm, and the management of Mark’s feelings about being named. The tension in the room went up, not down. And nothing inside Mark was resolved. Mark was not defending himself. He was defending his embodied racial tension.
What Recoil Looks Like
For many years I was terrified of feedback. I went into defensiveness or shame every time I was called up. So this second story is mine.
Early in my career, I sat on a planning committee for a community health fair. I was proud of the outreach plan I had drafted. When I finished presenting it, a Black colleague I’ll call Denise said: “This plan treats our neighborhood like a problem to fix. Nobody who lives there was asked what they need.”
I felt the heat rise up my neck. My throat closed. My stomach dropped through the floor. I said, “You’re right, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and my eyes filled with tears. Then I went silent. I did not say another word for the rest of the meeting. I stared at my notes and waited for it to end.
Afterward, Denise found me in the hallway to ask if I was okay.
That is recoil. An implosion of energy turned inward. Silence, tears, shame so heavy it becomes its own kind of paralysis. It can look like humility. It can even look like agreement. But notice what it did. My tears redirected the room’s attention from her feedback to my distress. Denise, who had just taken a real risk, ended up tending to me. The plan never got the community input it needed, because I was too collapsed to ask the question that mattered: who should we be talking to? The tension in my body went up, not down, and the external harm went unresolved.
Mark and I looked completely different in those moments. He exploded; I imploded. But we were doing the same thing. We were both protecting the tension rather than receiving the gift.
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Where the Assumption of Rightness Comes From
My conditioning trained me to be right at all costs. Mark’s did too. So where does this assumption of rightness come from?
In a culture designed to keep white people comfortable, discomfort arises in our bodies when actions that come directly from unconscious embodied racial tension are put into question. That discomfort predictably incites anger, defensiveness, denial, blame, and the urge to explain our way out. Reactivity, and the subtler tendencies of recoil, arise from the tension of an unconscious belief that “white is right.” That belief is further fueled by white folks’ belief in a “right to comfort,” a characteristic of white supremacy culture and a direct symptom of embodied racial tension.
This concept of the assumption of rightness grew out of my father Gary Howard’s life work in multicultural education, equity, and social justice. In his book We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know, he offers a white identity orientation model: a developmental journey for white folks from fundamentalist, to integrationist, to transformationist white identity. From more overtly racist, to unconsciously racist, to actively transforming.
“In the course of my work and personal reflection, I have discovered there are many ways of being white. Some whites are bound by a fundamentalist white orientation. They view the world through a single lens that is always right and always white.” — Gary Howard
Even those of us further along the journey revert to a fundamentalist orientation when put under pressure. The journey, my father says, is not always linear. In moments of racial charge, anger and defensiveness backed by “white is right” sentiment will rise up in white folks who otherwise orient mostly toward transformation. I have done it many times, living and working in racially diverse spaces. We move through predictable machinations to prove that we are right, that our anger is justified, that our discomfort means we are unsafe, or that our good intentions matter more than the real impact of our words.
It Is Not Your Personality Being Questioned
These knee-jerk reactions do not come from an authentic defense of self. They come from an unconscious defense of embodied racial tension, which is so woven into our personality that it feels personal. Reactivity and recoil never bloom from the authentic self. They bloom from our tension and our traumas.
This is the foundational truth I have found most empowering for people: in a moment of feedback, it is not your personality being questioned. It is the embodied racial tension itself.
This does not distance us from our responsibility to what the moment is asking. It offers enough clarity to step back from our reactivity or recoil, so we may become both a conscious observer and a living antidote to the tension.
If embodied racial tension caused the insensitive comment in the first place, then naming that comment is a visibilizing of the tension, not a personal attack. And that visibilizing is the only way we can reach what needs addressing. We need these moments to see what we have not been seeing.
Yet because the patterns are so normalized within us, we take it personally. The tension generally creates a short fuse and a blind eye. Even when it rises up and offers us the chance to look at it, without awareness, we will dig in our heels. We don’t look, don’t listen, don’t tend. We will do what we were trained to do. We will defend.
Within the body of study and practice of ISJ, it is within these activations that we apply the practices. The interoceptive and mindfulness practices of ISJ bring more presence to the moment, and allow us to address one of our deepest shadows. Embodied racial tension is what has us most wound up. It squeezes out our presence and disconnects us from our explicit values of equity and justice. Without somatic practices to unwind it, it will live outward through us and perpetuate the very things we stand against, without us even noticing.
The Choice Is Yours
All reactivity from embodied racial tension preserves embodied racial tension.
Remember Mark’s line: “If you’d brought that to me privately, I could have heard it.” In accountability work, some version of this is heard constantly. If you could just say it in a nicer way, then I could receive your feedback. These words use both denial and blame to preserve the tension. They blame someone else for our inability to receive, and deny our own responsibility to listen, learn, and shift. Most of us want so badly to defend our good intentions, our “what I meant to say was,” that we miss this: if our initial impact was harmful, reactivity and defensiveness make it exponentially worse.
In summary:
Reactivity is an explosion of energy. It shows up as anger, blame, and defensiveness. It creates more tension externally, with no resolution of the internal tension.
Recoil is an implosion of energy. It shows up as silence and tears, and turns us away from the moment. It creates more tension internally, with no resolution of the external tension.
Through a lifetime of tending to and unwinding my own embodied racial tension, I now know that being right, overexplaining, and defending my intentions are all symptoms. With the ISJ practices I have developed over the last 20 years, I can now pivot from defensiveness to presence. The mechanisms of my conditioning, a project none of us escape, will still do their best to keep me unconscious and ensure their own survival. But the pivot is real, and it is available to you.
The ISJ practices will increase your awareness of racial charge and of embodied racial tension as it activates. They will transform your resistance into responsibility. And they will help you to transmute moments of racial charge into moments of healing and possibility.
Every moment of feedback, every moment of racial charge, is an opportunity to either fortify your embodied racial tension or unwind it.
The choice is yours.
