Calculating Your Leisure Math: Reflecting on Equitable Vacation Planning
It's summer—more according to the calendar than the temperature. Regardless, I'm planning a vacation. I'm thinking about it in terms of how white dominant culture works – how my choices benefit me, how they disadvantage others, and how I can mitigate both.
Pretty much everyone has a stash of leisure time coming to them. The circumstances that grant one person weeks off—instead of, say, hours—map directly to what white life in America generally looks like:
A job with vacation benefits, or enough savings to cover living expenses while vacationing
Family members cared for by themselves, caregivers or facilities
Access to health care
Stable housing
The likelihood of not losing a job by taking a vacation, or having the skills to regain a comparable position
The probability of generational wealth to come
My gut feeling is that I can't afford an expensive or a long vacation. The truth is, my leisure stash is pretty substantial—I can check yes for most of these bullets. This has led me to spin off into squirrelly feelings about white privilege. While working through those feelings is important, right now I'm more interested in the impact I can make being responsible as who I am, with what I have.
So in planning my summer vacation, I did a bunch of calculations. You could call it leisure math:
How much of my vacation do I need to focus on me, in order to feel rested, rejuvenated, expanded afterward?
How much capacity do I have to focus time, labor or resources on others?
What can I contribute before/during/after that helps people with less leisure stash than me?
In my vacation choices, how can I minimize the ways that I am advantaged and take action about how others are disadvantaged?
What's the balance between me enjoying my vacation, and me taking responsibility for the ways I (both individually and as a player in a system) contribute to the oppression of others?
Here's one conclusion I've come to: I like to hike, cross-country ski and snowshoe. Each time I go, I contribute a $25/day fee to the peoples who originally inhabited the 'wilderness' I recreate in. For other vacation offsetting ideas like this, along with links & resources, the recommended resource “Vacation Offsetting”.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, reflections and decisions as you ponder your own leisure stash and summer plans as an (aspiring, beginning, hopeful) white antiracist. Drop me a note.
July 2022 Back to Blog Home
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