Shock

In moments of visible injustice, a familiar reaction appears: shock.

People speak as though something unprecedented has occurred. As though the ground has suddenly given way. As though the rules have changed and a previously stable system has become unpredictable.

But for those whose lives have long been shaped by racialized precarity in relation to state power, the ground was never stable. The possibility that the state could act violently, arbitrarily, or without justice is not a rupture in reality. It is a longstanding feature of it.

For some, this is a break in expectation. For others, it is a continuation of experience.

When members of the dominant culture respond to state violence as if it marks a new era, this does not simply reflect lack of information. It reveals the collective shadow.

In the earlier essays, we explored how the shadow, in Jungian terms, contains what a psyche refuses to recognize about itself. At the level of a society, the shadow holds the realities that contradict the story it tells about itself. For a nation that understands itself as fundamentally just, the ongoing presence of racialized exposure to state power cannot be integrated without disturbing that narrative.

So it is split off.

We know that what is split off does not disappear. Instead, it is carried by those who cannot escape its effects. The strain of ongoing exposure to unjust state power, in the absence of social recognition, can register as bracing, guardedness, or activation. The nervous system adapts not only to threat, but to the lack of shared acknowledgment that would allow the experience to resolve.

Under these conditions, the body cannot fully discharge. Vigilance becomes a baseline state. In this way, the body becomes a quiet archive of what the collective has not yet metabolized — a record written in tension, scanning, contraction, and fatigue. When co-regulation is withheld — when the social environment refuses recognition — the burden of regulation becomes private, even when the harm is public.

Living in a state of uncertain safety means that fight, flight, and freeze are not rare emergency responses but familiar states of regulation. Decisions about where to go, how to speak, how to move, and when to be visible are shaped by this background awareness. The cost is cumulative. Energy that could support growth, rest, or creativity is continuously diverted toward managing exposure to potential harm.

When a society fails to acknowledge the conditions that produce this adaptation, the burden remains individualized. The physiological imprint of collective denial is carried in bodies.

Those not required to organize their lives around this condition are able to experience each eruption as an anomaly. From their perspective, justice appears to have broken down. From another perspective, justice has always been conditional.

To believe that justice is fundamentally assured is to inhabit a particular social position. That belief feels like reality itself — neutral, obvious, unquestioned. When events contradict it, the experience is destabilizing. But the destabilization does not mean the system has changed. It means a protected perception has been disrupted.

This psychological pattern is not distributed evenly. It intersects with race, class, gender, immigration status, disability, and other social positions that shape one’s relationship to institutions of power. The experience of conditional protection is intensified where multiple forms of marginalization overlap. For some, the instability of justice is occasional. For others, it is woven into nearly every domain of life.

This point of view makes visible what the dominant narrative flattens: that “justice” is not a universal experience but a socially mediated one. The collective shadow persists, in part, because those most protected by the system are least required to perceive its limits.

When the collective shadow remains unexamined, injustice is repeatedly experienced by some as crisis and by others as continuity. The shock of the former does not cancel the long familiarity of the latter. It only reveals how unevenly reality has been distributed.

This understanding — that justice has never been equally assured — does not originate with those insulated from these conditions. It echoes the work of Black writers, journalists, activists, and cultural voices who have long been naming these realities, and others whose communities have historically borne the brunt of unequal state protection.

Readers unfamiliar with this perspective would do well to seek out their work directly, in the hope that we might better recognize the psychological structure that allows some of us to move through the world assuming a baseline of protection that is not, and has never been, universal.

Shock, in these moments, is not only an emotional reaction. It is a signal.

It reveals the collective shadow — the long-standing knowledge that justice has never been equally assured, and like all shadow material, will persist until it is made conscious.