Race and Power: Why the Body Is Where the Work Lives
For white Practitioners, Educators, and Activists
I have spent 25 years in clinical practice, in classrooms, and in facilitation rooms with practitioners, educators, and activists ~ and I keep encountering the same gap. People may arrive fluent in the language of racial justice. They can name systemic racism, unpack white privilege, cite the data on disparities in healthcare, education, and criminal justice. And then a real moment of racial charge lands in the room ~ a piece of feedback, a call-in, a client or student or colleague naming harm ~ and something else entirely takes over. The fluency disappears. What shows up instead is defensiveness, tears, silence, or an urgent need to explain.
This gap is not a failure of information. It’s a failure to address the right target. And if we want this work to actually change how harm moves through our clinics, our classrooms, and our organizing spaces, we have to get precise about what we’re treating.
Two Forces, One Root
There are two constricting forces at play in racial harm, and they are not the same thing, even though they get talked about as if they were.
The first is race-based bias ~ a rigidity of the mind. This is the realm of stereotype and assumption: the mental shortcuts absorbed from U.S. culture about who is trustworthy, who is dangerous, who is competent, who belongs. Bias is cognitive. In principle, it can be named, examined, and shifted through information, exposure, and reflection. This is the work most diversity trainings are prepared to do, and do well.
The second is what I call embodied racial tension, or ERT ~ and this is the piece that most anti-racist frameworks miss entirely. ERT is not a belief. It is a tension that lives in tissue. It’s the clench in the gut, the tightening in the throat, the flush of heat or wave of shutdown that arrives before a thought has even formed, the moment race enters a conversation. Where bias is a rigidity of mind, ERT is a rigidity of body, operating almost entirely beneath conscious awareness.
Born from the same tension-inducing root of our conditioning, both bias and ERT inhibit the same things: movement, fluidity, soulfulness ~ the capacity to stay open and responsive rather than closed and reactive. Both are the direct result of socialization by this country’s dominant culture. And both, together, are the root of the racial harm that continues to move through our institutions and our relationships long after the trainings have been attended.
How the Tension Gets There
Nobody consents to this conditioning. Every body raised in the United States receives conditioning that is racialized to some degree. But that conditioning does not land the same way in every body. It shapes each of us according to race, and left untended, it will continue to shape us and be passed on to our children ~ expressed outward through words, decisions, policies, and everyday choices that often feel, to the person making them, entirely reasonable, even well-intentioned.
ERT is not a character flaw. It is something that has wound bodies up over time ~ across our own lifetimes, and across generations, through the way families, schools, media, medical institutions, and workplaces transmit not just explicit beliefs but implicit somatic patterns: what gets rewarded, what gets punished, what gets flinched away from, what gets protected without ever being named out loud.
Why the Equation Matters
I want to offer a formula I use constantly, because it clarifies who bears distinct responsibility for this work, and why.
Racism = Prejudice + Power + Privilege
Prejudice — raw discomfort with difference, a preference for one’s own group ~ is, unfortunately, something close to universal; it shows up in virtually every population. But prejudice alone does not create the systemic racial harm we’re contending with in this country ~ in our clinics and classrooms. What creates that harm is prejudice combined with the power to shape culture and the privilege to embed one’s preferences into policy and institutional practice.
It follows from this that white-bodied people are the ones who can harbor and express racism in a white-supremacist-founded society like the United States, because white bodies hold both the power and the privilege to embed prejudice into cultural structures ~ into hiring practices, medical protocols, curriculum, policing, lending, and every other system practitioners and educators work inside of every day. This is not a judgment of individual character. Everyone carries prejudice. But this particular combination ~ prejudice plus structural power plus cultural privilege ~ is what makes ERT harmful specifically within white-bodied practitioners, educators, and activists, whatever the sincerity of their explicit values.
Treatable, Not Fixed
Here is the piece I most want you to sit with, whether you’re a clinician, a teacher, or an organizer: ERT is treatable. It is only a life sentence if it remains unconscious. Furthermore, the tension of whiteness is not identical to simply being white. Holding structural power within societal racial hierarchy and carrying embodied tension from racial conditioning are related, but they are not the same thing ~ which means the tension can be worked with directly, in the body, rather than only argued with in the mind.
This is great news, since many white folks get stuck in the “but I can’t do anything about being white” predicament.
The distinction between being white and the embodied racial tension of “whiteness” has real implications for whether we, as white folks, get stuck in guilt or move forward into the work of unwinding what is ours to unwind.
As for anti-racist trainings, the ones that operate purely at the level of information — history, terminology, statistics solely address bias. This is necessary, but not completely sufficient, because it leaves ERT completely untouched. A practitioner or educator can pass every implicit-bias assessment and still recoil, over-explain, or go silent the moment a patient names a harm, or a student calls out a comment, or a colleague offers direct feedback in a staff meeting.
The tension in the tissue does not respond to facts. It responds to somatic, repeated, embodied practice that teaches the nervous system a different pattern than the one our culture conditioned it into.
What This Means for Your Work
In all ways, if you are not receiving racialized feedback, then that is not a sign that you are exempt from the work, it means that you are solely encapsulated in social spheres designed to keep you comfortable.
“Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it’s actually worth a lot of discomfort.”
~Ijeoma Oluo
There is nothing more effective at keeping ERT in place than encapsulation. As a clinician, educator, or activist, this void of feedback should be a primary catalyst for unwinding ERT. As your energy begins to unwind and expand it creates more space in your sphere of influence for diversity. Encapsulation falls away, and you can begin the real work that comes with receiving feedback, being called up to a better way of being, and responding instead of reacting. This is the primary path of Internal Social Justice in practice.
If you are a clinician, this means the moment a patient’s feedback lands as a threat rather than as information is not a lapse in professionalism to be managed away ~ it is ERT activating, and it deserves the same clinical attention you’d give any other symptom.
If you are an educator, this means the discomfort that arises when a student names something racist in your classroom is data about your own nervous system, not evidence that the student is misbehaving.
If you are an activist or organizer, this means the burnout, the infighting, the defensiveness that so often fractures coalitions is frequently ERT moving through the room unaddressed, disguised as ideology or personality conflict.
None of this replaces the intellectual work of understanding how racism operates structurally in our country’s medical, educational, and public life. But it insists that the body is not incidental to that work ~ it is one of its primary sites. The mind can be informed in an afternoon. The body takes longer. That is exactly why Internal Social Justice is worth doing with patience, precision, and real practice, not just in the trainings we attend, but in the actual moments ~ with patients, students, and colleagues when the charge is highest and it matters most.
