Detour Cartoon

[Antonio Brittenham]

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When my kids were growing up, we had season passes to Silver Dollar City, an amusement park in Branson MO. From our home in Russellville AR, it was about a three-hour drive up scenic (and curvy) Highway 7 North to Harrison, and then Highway 65 into Branson. Russellville sat at the foothills of the Boston Mountains, right in the heart of the Ozark National Forest.

One particular weekend, we spent the night at a hotel so we could attend the church service at Silver Dollar City and enjoy a music festival taking place that weekend. About midday, a very heavy rain storm disrupted our plans, so we waited for a break in the weather and decided to pack it in and drive back to Russellville.

Thirdly, detours tax our patience and elevate our stress levels. The kids were tired, and they were hungry. Driving all over a series of winding country roads and passing through communities that were nothing more than a handful of farmhouses. No restaurants, no convenience stores, not even a grocery store or a gas station. Everyone just wanted this trip to be over and get home.

To my amazement, the kids sat up in their seats, turned their eyes to the windows, and started taking in the scenery. As we drove by farmhouses and through the countryside, the kids took turns pointing out things they had never seen, as well as some up close and personal views of some of their favorite animals, like horses, cows, and chickens. A huge hawk sat on a fence post, staring across a field. A family of deer stood near the road, munching away at the grass.

We saw kids on ATVs and horses. We saw farmers cutting and bailing hay. We laughed at some of the makeshift scarecrows in the gardens with crows sitting on their arms. We saw moms drawing water from a well and dogs splashing around in a creek. The normal, uneventful ride home through the forested hills had been transformed into a journey of discovery learning how people in these remote areas lived and raised their families.

Black Belt Leaders are flexible and adaptable. They understand that there is always more than one way to complete a task, finish a project, or get to the finish line. Sometimes God, Fate, or Life may take you on a twist or a turn that, in the moment, appears to be a setback.

How many times did Thomas Edison experience detours on his quest to create the incandescent lightbulb? How many times did Marie Curie experience detours on her quest to understand radium and how it could used to treat cancer?

Walt Disney was fired from his first job at a newspaper because he lacked imagination and had no good ideas. He went bankrupt while trying to start his own cartoon studio. Detour. His first movie was a total flop. Each of these experiences took Walt Disney on a journey of discovery, choosing to embrace the detours, see what was around the unexpected turn in the road, to become a pioneer in the field of animation, inspiring millions of children and adults.

Henry Ford went bankrupt before starting Ford Motor Company. Albert Einstein struggled academically in school. J.K. Rowling was rejected twelve times before publishing her first Harry Potter book. Steven Spielberg was rejected 2,000 times before he finally made it big in the movie industry. Steve Jobs was fired from the company he started, only to be rehired and revolutionize the industry with products like the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.

These men and women also embraced the detours, disguised as failure, only to discover something about themselves on this unexpected road of discovery. What looked to the world, and perhaps to them in the moment, as a setback turned out to be a setup for a greater level of success in life.

For white people living in North America learning to be anti-racist is a re-education process. I must unlearn the thorough racist conditioning to re-educate and re-condition myself as an anti-racist. I need knowledge, guidance and experience to avoid the detours and traps waiting for me on this journey.

This journey sends us into unfamiliar territory; we have never been here before. No white person has ever lived in a non-racist North America.) None of us has ever been taught the skills of anti-racist living. Indeed, we have been carefully taught the opposite: how to maintain our white privilege. Racism, the system (of oppression) and advantage (for white people) depends on the collusion and cooperation of white people for its perpetuation.

Our generous child wisdom told us racism was wrong, but there was no escape from the daily catechism of racist teaching. We did not choose to learn those lessons. We resisted the lies, the deceit and the injustice of racism, but we did not have to skills to counter the poisonous messages. We could not resist forever. Our conditioning filled us with fear, suspicion and stereotypes that substituted for true knowing of people of color. We internalized our beliefs about people of color, ourselves, other white people and about being white. Those internalized attitudes became actualized into racist behavior.

It is this legacy of a racist society that people of conscience struggle to transform. Our anti-racist journey propels us toward a future when this legacy will no longer be inherited by another generation. We journey on unmapped roads, encountering obstacles. We are tempted by short-cuts; take wrong turns and detours that waste our time and drain

Most of the detours or obstacles facing us, as anti-racists, are previously learned attitudes and habitual behaviors birthed in those attitudes. Experience identifying and breaking harmful habits in other arenas of my life has helped me on my justice-seeking journey.

As a white person, an anti-racist, I am required now to cross the line that separates my experience as target (women) to my place of privilege (white.) Here I must uncover what I have internalized about people of color, myself, other white people and being white. Then I have to identify how those internalized attitudes have been actualized into racist behavior. Like with the head-hitting, it is the behavior that signals the problem area. The behaviors will vary for each white person. I recognize that no two white people share exactly the same experiences and societal moldings. We learned racism in our unique and personal ways from different teachers and at different times. But we all learned the lessons well.

I have observed in myself and other white people of conscience, patterns of guilt, denial and defensiveness that appear regularly in our interactions with people of color and other white people. Below is an examination of several attitudes or behaviors that detour us from our anti-racist journey of re-education. Each one will be formatted in this way:

[A Note: Some statements, at first reading, may seem too obviously racist to be included here. I have found that even as I identify myself as an anti-racist, if I search deeply and honestly enough I still harbor attitudes on some level of consciousness, that sound very much like these. I am also painfully aware that earlier in my life I thought and said these things. That recognition of evolution may help me be an ally to another white person on her or his own anti-racist journey.]

(b) This form of denial is based in the false notion that the playing field is now level. When the people with privilege and historical access and advantage are expected to suddenly (in societal evolution time) share some of that power, it is often perceived as discrimination.

whether or not blame has been placed on us. As beneficiaries of racism and white privilege, we sometimes strike a defensive posture even when we are not being individually blamed. We may personalize the remarks, put ourselves in the center, but most references to racism are not directed personally at us. It is the arrogance of our privilege, that drags the focus back to us.

This diminishes the experience of people of color by telling our own story of hardship. We lose an opportunity to learn more about the experience of racism from a person of color, while we minimize their experience by trying to make it comparable or less painful than ours.

This detour into denial wrongly equates personal interactions with people of color, no matter how intimate they may be, with anti-racism. There is an assumption that our personal associations free us magically from our racist conditioning.

As white people we do not have to think about racism when our school, organization or community is all white. Racism does not usually become apparent TO US until there are people of color in our frame of reference.

When white people with privilege in some other aspect of their life (gender, sexual orientation, lack of disability, class, etc.) use their focus on racism as an excuse to not challenge and therefore perpetuate other forms of oppression, the consequence is a disingenuous and unsustainable commitment to justice.

White people often assume that they can learn about racism only from people of color. We further assume that people of color have the energy and/or desire to do this teaching. My understanding is that most people of color are weary of educating white people about racism.

I have no connection with or accountability to people of color. I do all my anti-racism with whites only. I am accountable only to other white people.

Reality Check and Consequence

Our silence may be a product our guilt or fear of making people of color or white people angry with us or disappointed in us. We may be silent because our guilt stops us from disagreeing with people of color. We may be afraid that speaking out could result in losing some of our privilege. We may be silenced by fear of violence. The reasons for our silence are many, but each time we are silent we miss an opportunity to interrupt racism, or to act as an ally or to interact genuinely with people of color or other white people. And no anti-racist action is taken as long as we are silent.

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