reading

“Beyond Guilt Trips is a fantastic guide to encountering cultural difference in productive ways.”

—Timothy Longman, associate professor of Political Science and International Relations, Boston University

“Though there are many books and guides that discuss the importance of being good eco-travelers, there are few that help us to be good “anthro-travelers.” Beyond Guilt Trips takes us deep into that world, providing tools for deeper awareness and engagement during our interactions with unfamiliar cultures and individuals. Taranath helps us to navigate our inner and outer journeys, and to return home with a profoundly enriched view of our world.”

—Jeff Greenwald, author of The Size of the World, director of EthicalTraveler.org

“Over the past twenty years I’ve led groups on tours and explored the globe on my own, travelling to over fifty countries. The search for deeper meaning is consistent through it all. Taranath is an expert at recognizing deeply felt issues and providing an approach that is inclusive and fulfilling. Let her be your guide through whatever travels you have ahead!”

—Ben Cameron, Rick Steves’ Europe tour guide

“This is the guide I wished I’d had when first starting to travel the world as a young person. Packed with wisdom and useful tips, Beyond Guilt Trips should be in all campus libraries, youth hostels, and community organizations.”

—Faith Adiele, author of Meeting Faith and founder of VONA Travel Writing

“Taranath skillfully blends storytelling with a guidebook approach to how we can all travel better—go beyond good intentions and become intentional travelers. A much-needed book to transform the travelscape.”

—Amy Gigi Alexander, editor-in-chief, Panorama: the Journal of Intelligent Travel

“Taranath illuminates perspectives that many of us seldom consider but are vital to our understanding of our neighbors and ourselves, both at home and abroad.”

—Larry Habegger, executive editor, Travelers’ Tales Books

“I am so grateful for this book, for it left me reflecting on the one trip we are all on, traveling through this life! Taranath is an excellent and humble storyteller who teaches us through stories. Readers will find nuggets here that will help us all to be our best selves.”

—Michele E. Storms, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union, Washington State

“Anu’s writing never sugarcoats, but helps us speak about unequal structures, uncomfortable facts, and our own positions as we travel five or five thousand miles from what’s familiar. This isn’t just a book to read; it’s a way to walk in the world.”

—Dr. Peter Moran, former director, University of Washington Study Abroad Office

“At a time when it has become radical to ask ourselves what it means to be who we are, where we are, Beyond Guilt Trips holds space for these conversations where there wasn’t any before.”

—Bani Amor, queer travel writer

“Beyond Guilt Trips offers a consciousness-raising for travelers, even as it shows us ways to stay present and compassionate amidst a sea of potential confusion, doubt, and guilt.”

—Laurie Hovell McMillin, editor of Away Journal

“Taranath offers the reader sympathetic understanding while firmly naming the realities and complexities of the unjust societies we inhabit and create. While she does not let us off the hook, she consistently brings us back to our shared humanity. I wish this book had been available when I first began to travel abroad.”

—Tina Lopes, co-author of Dancing On Live Embers: Challenging Racism in Organizations

“Taranath unflinchingly confronts the awkward feelings of guilt, shame, and privilege that inevitably arise from international (and even inter-neighborhood) travel, and somehow manages to stare them down, deconstruct them, and take away their power. Beyond Guilt Trips is an essential companion to all those leading, engaging in, or contemplating travel, to ensure they will embark on an inward journey that mirrors the outward one.”

—Claire Bennett, co-author of Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteer Travel

“Beyond Guilt Trips is part reflective memoir, part ethnographic deep-dive, and part user manual for navigating our increasingly unequal world. . . This book is certainly the most teachable—and instructive— book on global travel I have read yet.”

—David Citrin, Global Health and Anthropology, University of Washington

“Beyond Guilt Trips unpacks some of the biggest racial and cultural issues facing Westerners traveling abroad. In straightforward language, Taranath addresses white privilege, micro-aggressions, inequality, and the unspoken rules of race and economics that travelers face when visiting foreign cultures. Simple, necessary, and razor-sharp, this book is an accessible and friendly guide for anyone interested in learning how to ‘sit with discomfort.’”

—Adriana Paramo, author of Looking for Esperanza and My Mother’s Funeral

“When Mark Twain observed that travel was fatal to bigotry and narrow-mindedness, he somehow predicted we would have this wise and timely book in hand. Taranath shows us how to build a toolbox of keen observation, respectful engagement, and honest examination as we move among our neighborhoods as well as through our world.”

—David Fenner, Peace Corps volunteer 1979–82, founding director, World Learning Oman Center, former assistant vice provost for international education, University of Washington

“This book takes us into the heart of where we need to go if we truly aim to do away with injustice and transform the world.”

—Michael Westerhaus MD, MA and Amy Finnegan PhD, co-directors, SocMed

“Instead of guilting or shaming people when they become more aware of their privilege or wealth, Beyond Guilt Trips brings everyone along without erasing histories of oppression. With a generous spirit, Taranath holds space for both the learning of travelers and the dignity of the people they encounter, offering the possibility of meaningful mutual exchange.”

—Frances Lee, writer and cultural activist

Beyond Guilt Trips

Mindful Travel in an Unequal World

First published in 2019 by Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West

Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

Canada

1-800-718-7201

www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 69 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1K3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Taranath, Anu, author

Beyond guilt trips : mindful travel in an unequal world / by Anu Taranath.

Includes index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77113-432-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77113-433-0
(EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77113-434-7 (PDF)

1. Developing countries--Description and travel.
2. Travel--Social aspects. 3. Travel--Moral and ethical aspects.
4. Taranath, Anu--Travel. I. Title.

G151.T37 2019 910.9172’4 C2018-906064-6
C2018-906065-4

Text and cover design by Maggie Earle

Cover and interior illustrations by Ronald “Otts” Bolisay, https://otts.carbonmade.com

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Education does not make us educable. It is our awareness of being unfinished that makes us educable.

—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Planes carry passengers. What passengers carry on their consciences, their guilt, grievances, goodwill is hard to say.

—Romesh GUNESEKERA, Noontide Toll

Prologue

Beyond Guilt Trips: Practical Application for Travelers

Toni Morrison wrote, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I took Ms. Morrison’s sentiment to heart, and this is that book. As I began to write, I recorded the kinds of discomforting feelings I and many Western travelers I know experienced, but hadn’t seen represented in a book form. I pictured my reader: a well-intentioned young adult from the West who travels to low-income countries in the Global South. This person feels sensitivity and curiosity for others, though hasn’t necessarily had much exposure to or experience with conversations about identity, race, diversity, and equity; access to resources; structural oppression; and how all these issues might play out in people’s lives.

During the writing and research process, I began to realize that the guilt and discomfort we may experience abroad on account of the differences in race, resources, and culture oftentimes mimic the guilt and discomfort we may experience much closer to home as we move through different neighborhoods and communities, or even work with different kinds of people. Put differently, experiencing guilt and discomfort when we’re far away from home and experiencing guilt and discomfort when we’re nearer to home are all instances of difficult-to-navigate feelings that can be useful to unpack, process, and reflect upon. These feelings are connected in many ways and originate from similar historical processes that have to do with identity, power, and social hierarchies. So while this book is for you if you’re, say, embarking on a study abroad program to South Africa or currently in the middle of your governmental or NGO volunteer placement in Cameroon, this book is also for you if you’re a student in the West enrolled in a service-learning course. It’s for you if you’re preparing to do field research abroad or community-based research and scholarship closer to home, engaged in faith-based service projects at home or abroad, or interning in an afterschool program or a local non-profit focused on providing resources to disadvantaged populations in your town or city.

You need not, though, have traveled, volunteered, or even be a student to find something useful in these pages. This book can be a resource if you’re craving productive conversation on diversity, equity, and identity issues as part of staff professional development in your public agency, school district, library system, company, or firm. If you’ve got a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” committee at your workplace or are having diversity challenges of many sorts, this could be a suitable book to inspire constructive dialogue and model conversation. It could even be useful for your school or college as a common text to read and discuss if you’re part of a campus-wide “day of service,” like the one typically held in the United States on Martin Luther King Jr. Day every January, or Canada’s National Volunteer Week held yearly in April. Though most of the examples I’ve used throughout the book relate to international travel, the underlying issues of who we are and how we might notice and navigate our differences in an unfair world can relate to any of us, both at home and abroad.

Though this isn’t a typical memoir, I often describe my own experiences as a way to invite you to consider your own journeys from a broader perspective. Throughout the book, you’ll also hear from a wide range of student travelers who reflect on their journeys across race and class in lands both far and near. Though I’ve often used pseudonyms and changed identifying details, all the stories you’ll read are based on true experiences. Some stories focus on my own travels with groups of students or on my own. Some draw from conversations I’ve had with travelers, tourists, program directors, group leaders, volunteers, and students traveling abroad; others draw from student assignments, focus groups, email correspondence, or field report journals.

Politics of Care

It might be helpful to say a bit about where this book is located politically and socially. All of my work is embedded in a politics of care, transformative social change, and deep justice for both ourselves and others. When I think about my ideal vision for how our society should be, I’d like to see a society in which all people enjoy the benefits and riches of a quality life, not just those who have power, wealth, educational access, a particular skin color or body shape. I’d like a society in which we can all love who we’d like to love and look how we’d like to look. A society where all of us enjoy good nutrition and healthcare, green trees, and warm homes. A society in which kids play and read books and where all of us feel heard, seen, and validated. I’d like a society in which we all have enough—not just a few of us, but all of us.

Illustration of two empty chairs in a clearing near a wooded area.

Our world though is not set up like this. The sad truth of our status quo is that too many of us—both in our own communities and around the world—feel ostracized and live without enough of too many things: opportunity, safety, peace, and security. Many of us want to remedy these problems, and so we work for social justice in both small and big ways. We investigate and question the “business-as-usual” status quo, search for ways to be more equitable, and forge paths toward personal and community wellbeing. When we critically notice our surroundings and ask questions about how systems of power confer advantages for some and difficulties for others, we practice the first steps toward interrupting unfair systems. When more of us wonder why business-as-usual often means more opportunity, safety, peace, and security for fewer of us we build a stronger movement for accountability and change.

Movements for peace and justice must dismantle unfair power structures, but must also prioritize loving relationships between people. My sense of justice work is compassion-based and intensely local, no matter where in the world I might be. My approach is similar to Frances Lee's, a scholar who writes about activist culture: “I believe in ‘yes and’ methods of justice work; yes, a historical system of oppression operates in our society that results in mass inequity and harm, and we all have the capacity to recognize the humanity in each other and forge genuine connections.” Justice work for me is not only about working to change what is ugly and unequal in society; it is also about going deep into our own personal stories to be more in tune with ourselves, our values, and heartfelt alignment.

Whether you picked up this book on your own or you’ve been asked to read it by a teacher, program leader, colleague, or professor, the fact that you are holding it signals to me your willingness to consider and engage with the ideas presented. While I won’t sugarcoat things to artificially sweeten the tough parts (because that’s not good teaching), please know that I will not shame or blame you for particular features like your race, wealth, gender, being raised in a high-income country, or anything you do not control. Maya Angelou has said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” In my opinion, shame and blame can be useful tools for political movements, but they do not constitute good teaching and often do not result in good learning. Shame, in fact, corrodes our connections to one another and keeps us isolated. Beyond Guilt Trips is meant to do the exact opposite. I will not shame and blame you for any of your identities and advantages and, rather, will ask you to question your own experiences and place in the world. Together, we can work on transforming our guilt trips across difference into more productive explorations about ourselves and each other.

Though Beyond Guilt Trips has been foremost on my mind the last few years, I know this book—or any book, really—cannot shift society. A book’s value is only as good as the people who engage with it. Therein lies our potential. James Baldwin’s words come to mind: “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. . . . The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way . . . people look at reality, then you can change it.”

Beyond Guilt Trips

Contents

Prologue

Beyond Guilt Trips: Practical Application for Travelers

Politics of Care