The eCrozier

For months on end, we had a broken wooden HVAC floor register in our kitchen. It was a real safety hazard. Because the wooden slats were shattered, one of our dogs could’ve had her paw go through and get stuck, or even worse, severely damage her leg. It was also a trip hazard for humans. So, I’d be in the kitchen, see the broken register and say to myself: “I should do something about that.” You see, in the division of labor in our household, I’m the “fixit guy” (no one wants me cooking, trust me on that). Kelly never complained I wasn’t doing my job. She just took a flat plastic pot holder and placed it over the broken register. That worked except when the HVAC kicked in, the air coming out of the register would blow the pot holder off the gaping hole. But I never got around to replacing the register for well over six months. It was hardly a big deal to fix it. All I had to do was measure the opening, go to Home Depot, buy a new one, and install it. It was classic “work avoidance,” the kind psychologists write about.

White people (like me) in our country are suffering from classic work avoidance when it comes to racism. We see it in the incarceration rates and the police shootings. We see it in the inequality of our schools. We hear it, most disturbingly, coming out of the mouths of some of our most prominent elected leaders. And when we do, we cringe and say: “I should do something about that.” But then we don’t. When psychologists address work avoidance, they see it as a problem rooted in anxiety. We see the work we have to do, but since it makes us anxious, we just avoid doing it. Of course, that doesn’t work. We even know it won’t work, yet we avoid addressing the problem anyway. This avoidance behavior actually makes matters worse, raising our anxiety even more, not to mention our feelings of guilt and shame for our avoidance behavior.

That explains why so many white people don’t do anything about our racism. And it also explains why racism is so persistent. It just won’t go away as long as we avoid actually addressing it for the problem it is. Some of the avoidance behavior I hear sounds like this: “I don’t see people’s color” or “my family didn’t own slaves so it’s not my problem” or “growing up, I never learned to hate.” While each of these may be partially true for some of us (although I’m skeptical), we live in a culture inbred with policies and practices that assume white superiority. When we refuse to recognize this inherent reality, we give ourselves permission to avoid our work.

I admit waking up to the reality of my complicity in racism isn’t a pleasant experience. When our work avoidance on this finally hits home, we can still become paralyzed by the enormity of the problem, so we do things to make us feel better. We read books about racism. We watch documentaries describing racism. We go to a Civil Rights museum. We vote for people who speak against racism. We do these things hoping we can feel better about ourselves. But racism isn’t about how we feel. It’s about how our social, political, and economic systems maintain racial inequality. Psychologists tell us that to overcome work avoidance we have to learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, recognize the real cost of avoidance, and then act. Covering the gaping hole of racism won’t solve the problem. That’s just work avoidance. We have to act.

+Scott