White Saviorism in the Nonprofit World
How much of why we donate comes from our need to satisfy our ego?
A big racial gap exists in the nonprofit world, where many organisations that are involved in charity work serve communities of colour but lack racial diversity in their leadership. I was assigned to work on a social media campaign for the NGO — ‘Save the Children’ with a few of my other coursemates as part of a college assignment. I couldn’t understand why I felt so excluded and unsettled from the first day of working together. Perhaps it must have something to do with me being a brown girl of Asian descent, I thought. With every interaction with the group, I felt an increasing sense of ownership over me, my time, my words, my actions. The treatment I was receiving from them, for no apparent fault of my own, made me put up more boundaries, which they would come to trample over eventually. They were not checking in to see how I was or what I was doing and completely neglected my ideas and suggestions. To top it all off, they would go on to randomly question my conviction towards my work and point fingers at me without backing it up with credibility. More days passed, and I began to understand, or at least it seemed to me, that it was coming from a place of guilt — guilt that came from the shame of participating in racism. When one girl asked me to do something, and I didn’t obey her, her tone immediately went from ‘sweet and sugary’ to ‘rude and snappish’.
After conducting our survey to understand why people donate to charities, we gathered that a stand-out reason was due to the ‘white saviour complex’. I came to realise that the intentions behind these donations that white people made and the inquiries behind it that my white coursemates were now making were self-serving in every way possible. This was a stage performance, an acted-out act of service, a way to manage their perception so their ego could feel better about all that is wrong in the world. My groupmates now came swooping in with a freshly ironed cape, as if it had only just occurred to them that they, too, could and must do something about racism.
White Saviorism refers to the idea that a white person or a white culture rescues people of colour from their own situation. This may stem from a place of compassion, but this compassion may become dangerous when, in the process of ‘empowering’ others, we end up taking away their ability to help themselves, grow as a community and have a sense of agency. This was an important ‘ethical consideration’ in our project because of the prominence of a donor-centric ideology within the nonprofit world that has led to systems that protect the ‘donor’ rather than the ‘participants’ of the program. It was, now more than ever before, increasingly important to do an honest assessment of white saviorism and the insidious ways in which it can creep up in before taking any further steps.
There is an impulsive desire to fix things, to be the hero of the story, to swoop in and ‘do their part’ and rescue. For most, this comes from a place of superiority and a desire to be excused for ‘their’ behaviour. It feeds into something called ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’, a term coined by Teju Cole, an American Nigerian writer and Harvard Professor, in an article he wrote in 2012.
“White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice; it’s about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege… There is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference’. There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.” said Cole.
I believe what he explains in his article is quite difficult to understand and, more importantly, to get right. Because people really do think they are doing the right thing, but without understanding the consequences. As Ted Simons once said,
“I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.”
In fundraising, we are often told that our work must be audience-centric, and hence, we have developed the image of donors as heroes, therefore reinforcing white saviorism. ‘Poverty porn’ — fundraising imagery which features exaggerated and dehumanised starving African children, completely alone, whose very existence is portrayed to be dependent on the ‘goodness’ of saviours from the West has become the standardised approach used by the majority of NGOs simply because they are lucrative in attracting more funding. As Susan Sontag says, “there is an element of aggression implicit in every utilization of the camera due to the proliferation of a mentality in which the tangible world is always seen as the subject of a potential photograph — an imperialistic notion, compelling photographers to capture as many subjects as possible” and so, we must reevaluate our intentions behind creating such photographs and assess the consequences of displaying such images to the public because like psychiatrist Frantz Fanon stated -“the image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity, it must never be read mimetically as the ‘appearance’ of a ‘reality’. The image is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by the same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss”.
Charities greatly influence how the realities of the communities they work with are presented to donors. How aid is given becomes key. The first step is not to ‘other’ communities because they may be different from us because, as Ryszard Kapuściński once said, “the first laws of nature are the same for all peoples... not to offend anyone, to grant each man his due.”
To dismantle the white saviour complex, we must first unpack the privilege that Teju Cole spoke of that is ever present within the structures and spaces in which we function. We have to recognise that racism is a process, not a destination — that there is a fine line between actually helping and being performative. We need to ask ourselves — ‘am I doing this because it is the right thing to do or am I doing this to feel better and make myself look good?’. The key is to change the narrative from being a ‘saviour’ to being a true ‘ally’ — to learn how to recognise what everyday racism looks like, to actively listen and accept that there is no magic solution and a one-size-fits-all approach to this and to recognise that the only way to begin the process of becoming anti-racist is to embark on a journey to ‘unlearn’ your racism because it is only on that journey that you will find your path to becoming actively anti-racist and truly inclusive of people, irrespective of colour.