Resistance and Recalcitrance: The Walls We Build and the Voices We Silence

Resistance is the force within us that pushes back against what we do not want to see, hear, or feel. It rises when an idea challenges the stories we have constructed about ourselves and the world—when something knocks against the fragile architecture of our beliefs, threatening to dismantle what we have carefully arranged. Recalcitrance, its close companion, is the deep-seated refusal to move, to yield, to even entertain the possibility that another truth exists beyond our own.

There are moments in our lives when we stand in resistance to an external force—when we brace ourselves against the discomfort of another’s perspective, unwilling to let it seep in and take root. Perhaps it is an ideology that contradicts our worldview, a truth that unsettles us, or an accusation that demands accountability. In these moments, we feel the instinctive urge to defend, to block, to deny. We shut down conversation, retreat into silence, or lash out in anger. We construct walls, sometimes with logic and reason, sometimes with avoidance and rage.

Yet, just as we resist, so too does the world resist us. When we seek justice in systems designed to protect themselves, we encounter a more insidious form of recalcitrance—an institutionalized resistance fortified by bureaucracy, legal immunity, and the weight of history. Those who benefit from these structures hide behind the law’s barriers, making it nearly impossible for truth to breach the walls they have erected. Even when faced with undeniable harm, these systems stand unmoved, their recalcitrance not merely personal but codified into policy, into doctrine, into the very mechanisms meant to protect the vulnerable.

What then, does resistance look like—both when it arises within us and when we encounter it in others? Do we recognize it in the tightening of our jaw, the dismissal of another’s pain, the refusal to sit with what is uncomfortable? Do we see it in the institutions that shield themselves from accountability, pretending their hands are clean even as lives are destroyed by their decisions?

And how do we make ourselves immune to what we do not want to acknowledge? We interrupt, we ridicule, we turn away. We declare, “That’s not my problem.” We refuse to hear the stories that challenge our comfortable narratives. We find refuge in distraction, in justifications, in the collective amnesia that allows injustice to persist.

But what if, instead of resisting, we opened? What if, instead of pushing back, we leaned in? There is power in resistance, but there is greater power in transformation. When we recognize our own recalcitrance—not as a shield, but as an invitation to examine what we are so afraid of—we begin to dismantle the walls, brick by brick.

And perhaps, in that space where resistance once stood, something else can take root: Understanding. Truth. Change.