What is Internal Social Justice (ISJ)™?

Wade into the shallow end of the work.

Internal social justice™ is the internal work necessary to amplify our external social justice work and healing justice activism. It is the practice of turning the essential tool of awareness inward — toward the body, the nervous system, and the inherited and accumulated tension that racial conditioning — in order to cause less harm and create more belonging within our personally and professionally spheres of influence, both. Internal social justice™ is a field of study and practice that helps to ensure that even our activism won’t create more harm.

It begins from a single, counterintuitive premise: that the most urgent focal point of racial justice work is not out there, in the institutions and systems we can see, but in here, in the physiological patterns we cannot easily see — in the tissue, the nervous system, the unconscious reactivity that shapes how we move through the world.

Thanks for reading the Internal Social Justice™ Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support the work.

Racial conditioning — the continuous, ambient process by which a white supremacist culture shapes the beliefs, behaviors, and reflexes of everyone living within it — does not stop at the door of the well-intentioned.

It does not check for the right politics or the right values. It does its work in all of us, and it lands in the body as a form of chronic tension that operates beneath awareness and beneath intention.

Internal social justice™ names that tension — embodied racial tension, or ERT — and takes it seriously as a physiological reality rather than a moral abstraction.

It does not ask: are you a racist? That question, however earnest, leads nowhere useful. It asks instead: where does race-based tension live in your body, and how does it show up when it is activated? That question has an answer that can be felt, located, and, with practice, changed.

The change that internal social justice™ promises is not achieved through information alone, though understanding matters. It is not achieved through blame, though accountability matters. . The change is achieved beneath the surface of the intellect, within a somatic unwinding of ERT. This unwinding is what we are to hold ourselves and each other accountable to. The change is achieved through the deliberate, repeated practice of noticing — in real time, in the actual moments when racial tension arises — what is happening in the body, and choosing, from that awareness, a different response than the one conditioning has installed.

This is not a metaphor for social transformation. It is the mechanism of it.

It is the mechanism of rewiring our individual bodies out of chronic patterns of embodied racial tension. When we do sincerely participate in the mechanisms of rewire, our work changes, our relationships change. The spaces we occupy change — not because we have adopted a new ideology, but because something in the body has genuinely and palpably shifted.

For all people, regardless of racial identity, the work is real and the invitation is the same, even as the specific terrain differs. For white people, ERT carries the additional weight of institutional power — the combination that most directly produces harm in others, and that most urgently calls for this kind of root-level, somatic attention. For BIPOC, ERT arrives through the accumulated physiological burden of navigating systems built to center around someone else’s body. The internal practice offers something different but equally essential: a way to move through the world with more agency, more somatic clarity, and less emotional cost, and to bring the full authority of one’s own embodied knowledge into every room.

Internal social justice™ is not a substitute for structural change. Policies matter. Institutional change matters. New legislation matters. But structural change that is not accompanied by internal transformation is perpetually vulnerable — to political backlash, to institutional inertia, to the unconscious reproduction of the same patterns by people who have changed their language without changing their bodies. Internal social justice™ addresses what structural change cannot reach: the chronic physiological conditioning that lives beneath ideology and outlasts any policy. It is the work that cannot be legislated away, because it lives in the body of the individual and moves, from there, outward into every relationship, every room, every structure that individual helps to build.

The destination of this work — for any person who pursues it with sincerity and consistency — is not the elimination of bias, which is an ongoing process rather than an achievable endpoint. The destination is belonging: the quality of presence and relationship in which others are not merely tolerated or included but genuinely encountered; where the full humanity of every person is not an aspiration but a lived practice; where the space you occupy becomes, because of who you have become, a space where others can arrive without the additional burden of navigating your unaddressed tension.

Internal social justice™ is, finally, a form of medicine — not only in the clinical sense, but in the oldest sense of the word. It is the work of restoring the free movement of life force through a body that has been constricted. The constriction is racial conditioning. The medicine is the keen awareness and the relentless practice that lead directly to liberation. And its effects extend, in every direction, far beyond the person doing the work. This is internal social justice™.