I’ve been watching Oprah’s special, “Where Do We Go From Here.” In this show, she is having a conversation with several prominent Black writers, researchers, change agents, and artists about their reactions to the murder of George Floyd.  As you can imagine, the discussion is full of gut-wrenching emotional stories, many of which I will remember for the rest of my life. Several participants mentioned that they are exhausted. They are utterly spent from White people asking them how they can help, each time another Black life is lost to race hatred. They are worn out from generations of violence against Blacks, after which nothing changes. They are drained from the futility of trying to make their children’s and grandchildren’s lives free of racism.

Their message to white people is: Please. Go do the work. You get upset about these incidents of violence against Black people, and then you go back to business as usual, while Blacks go back to being victims of racial violence. You need to do the work of building an anti-racist society. It’s not up to Black people to do that. We are not racists. Go where the problem is constantly manifesting: in the White population. Start learning and teaching each other how to become anti-racists.

Ava DuVernay, a filmmaker, commented that White people keep asking her to speak at various engagements about the Black experience, or to contribute her time to anti-racist causes, which she has been doing for years. She is now done with playing that role. It sucks time away from her work, her talents, her life, she says. For her and other Black leaders, the murder of George Floyd convinced them that they need to fully reclaim their own lives, and let the White population get to work on building an anti-racist culture among White people.

After listening to their discussion, this line from Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken” came to mind:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both…

Imagine that one road is actually a long and winding river. The other is a straight path that runs alongside the river and through the woods, right into the heart of the matter. The way we White people have been responding to racism has been like that long and winding river. We hear of a random killing of a black person. We get fired up about racism – going to vigils, writing protest posters, reading and writing anti-racist commentary.

A few weeks later, as if we’ve bumped into the bank on one side of the river, we bounce right back into the mainstream – until the next incident grabs our attention and galvanizes our energies to fight for racial justice. Then we’ll pull our boat over to that bank for a while. Eventually, we get back in our boat and drift away again, back into the mainstream, meandering up the river until the next event.

Any forward momentum we hope to gain is nullified when the route meanders like that. By the time we make a little progress toward the goal, the currents in the river have carried us backward.

I am no different. I have had many opportunities over the years to learn more about both structural racism and my own inherent racism that comes from growing up white in a White dominant culture. I am finally doing the work.

I am not alone. Many White people around me who, like me, have been situational protesters – serial protesters, if you will – are finally doing the work. We are working on our own inherent racism, and we are working to understand and interrupt the racism inherent in our workplaces and communities.

That is the direct path, the one that runs alongside the river. It has some rocks to climb, some undergrowth to clear, a few buzzing pests that want to discourage us. But it is going to get us where we need to go a lot faster than that meandering mainstream.

We cannot travel both roads. Either we step outside the flow of the river and try that other path through the woods, and remain committed to the work of becoming anti-racist, or we will end up in the backward flow once again.