In my previous four blog posts I spoke about Clicktivism, White Saviourism, the importance of intersectionality, and finally I offered some Dos and Don’ts when it comes to communicating social change.
These were mostly lighthearted posts about deeply problematic issues, all, in my opinion, connected by what Nigerian author Chimananda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” (2009). That is, a narrow, singular, nuance-less view on a topic, a people, or a place.
I use bell hooks’ words “Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy”, and try to delve a little deeper into them all.
A Single Story
Adichie beautifully explained The Danger of a Single Story in her homonymous TED Talk eleven years ago. She spoke of her experience going to university in The United States, finding herself sharing a room with a girl who was surprised she could speak English and use a stove.
“She had felt sorry for me before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity”. Her roommate’s single story of “Africa” was of “catastrophe” alone (2009).
Clicktivism as a phenomenon and White Saviourism as an attitude are a direct result of a single-story paradigm. The single story of the literally and figuratively poor other and the white person going to a so-called poor country to do good.
One of the reasons it is dangerous is because it does not allow for the dignity nor agency of those directly involved, the so-called recipients of aid/development/pity, you name it.
This is not a new idea. Lila Abu-Lughod in her paper Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthrolopological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, points out that by intending to “save” someone, you are implying that you are saving them “from something”, and “to something” (2002, p. 788). She questions the violence needed in this “transformation”, and points out the sense of superiority that the process depends on and reinforces (pp. 788-789). This process is not exclusive to Afghani women, to which Abu-Lughod refers.
It started in colonial times, when “the North” invaded “the South” in order to “civilize”, “save”, and “enlighten” the “savages” (as well as claiming all their resources and putting them in a cage to display alongside zoo animals).
Legal scholar Ratna Kapur, in regards to the Catholic Church’s role in development and Pope John Paul II’s call for “real equality in every area”, notes that “human rights are a contested terrain” which cannot be read linearly (Kapur, 2006, p.670). Yet the Vatican, while opposing violence against women, also seeks to “preserve the family” and therefore women’s traditional gender role. Real implications for the “other” stem from the ways the “other” has been discussed in the human rights discourse, which runs parallel and intertwines with the development discourse. According to Kapur, the “other” can be “tamed and assimilated”, the differences between “us” and “the other” can either be considered natural and inevitable, or they can be erased completely, and finally, the extreme response towards “the other”, as we’ve seen, is “incarceration, internment or even annihilation”, to thwart the threat it presents, (2006, p. 670) real or perceived as it may be.
White Saviours
Teju Cole, who coined the term White-Saviour Industrial Complex in his essay on the topic, said, “Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied” (2012).
Elisabeth Smith Cooney-Petro explains in her thesis Branding White Saviorism: The Ethics and Irony of Humanitarian Discourse on Instagram, in relation to American Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs), “PCVs are performing the role of humanitarian for themselves as much as they are for the spectator.” (2019, p. 41). She continues, “Unlike [George] Yancy’s white gaze, which fears the racialized Other, or the colonial gaze, which acts to conquer or exoticize the Other, the white savior gaze perpetuates a naïve innocence and belief in one’s good intentions to justify the practice of photographing the Other and doing so for one’s own self-branding purposes”. (p.63).
Consuming strangers
Barbie Saviour, the Instagram account that inspired much of my post on White Saviourism, demonstrates Cooney-Petro’s findings. Although non-consensual photographs are just part of the bigger picture that is White Saviourism, they play a role in perpetuating stereotypes, including that of the White Saviour. These images are somehow self-legitimizing, ensuring their own continuation across new waves of PCV recruits, as well as non-formal types of volunteering and working overseas.
Cooney-Petro further explores the PCVs’ penchant to post photos of themselves wearing “local” clothing, in order to “assimilate (…) as the Other” (pp.62-63). “The privileged, entitled positionality of the volunteer is overlooked because of the compassionate willingness to become like the Other, believing equality can be established by such a simple, performative act” (p. 43). The same can be said of contemporary fashion photo shoots. bell hooks spoke of this in the 1980s regarding a fashion catalogue featuring Egypt as a “landscape of dreams, and its darker-skinned people background, scenery to highlight whiteness” (1987, p.28). hooks calls it “imperialist nostalgia” (p.29), a longing to be like the Other, an attraction to the so-called primitive, which erases “racial, cultural, political, and societal relations of power” (Cooney-Petro, p.62-63).
Sara Ahmed further talks of “consuming strangers” argues that the movement of images playing with the idea of “otherness” and “difference” across borders both reproduces and “threaten[s] the imaginary boundaries between social or racial groups” (2000, p. 116). Therefore the other, or “stranger”, “becomes a fetish” through the consumer culture and the commodification of “representations of difference” (Ahmed, 2000, pp. 115-116). If this was true when she penned these words in the year 2000, it has grown exponentially in the last 20 years.
What Cooney-Petro, Cole, and Ahmed describe is the same phenomenon Lilie Chouliaraki calls “egoistic altruism”, which “explicitly situates the pleasures of the self at the heart of moral action” (p. 4). If humanitarianism is in fact a “liberal idea born out of capitalism” (Chouliaraki p. 5), the prospects are risky due to these phenomena taking place within an “economy of scarcity”. When organisations are competing for limited funds, they will tend to bow down to the demands of western donors, rather than the priorities in the country served (p. 6), meaning “the least fortunate [are] getting the least attention” (Barnett and Weiss, 2008, p.34, as cited by Chouliaraki, p.6).
One of the issues with female white saviourism in particular, is that – in the case of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Stacey Dooley, which I discussed in blog about White Saviourism– the message sent to the viewing public is that the reason these women can make such a difference in the world is that they’re white, beautiful, and accomplished (in fields other than development) – and not because of a keen interest or knowledge of a situation (Hopkins, 2018). This, and the commodification of strangers described by Ahmed, is echoed in Cooney-Petro’s observations of PCVs’ instagram accounts.
But, why?
It makes no sense for anyone to keep propping up patriarchal systems. They harm both genders and gender non-conforming people. So why do systems such as patriarchy, imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism persist and why do (some of these) continue to be pursued by developing nations? hooks believes women play a substantial role in the continuation of patriarchy (and no doubt we do for imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism itself). She attributes women voting for personalities like Trump to the “tantalizing force and seduction” of money (2017).
“Because: money!” is an easy answer to the question, but of course is a simplification. The answer to the “why” of all this is far too complex for me to address here, but I will offer some of Robin Di Angelo’s words; white guilt, fear, anger and the fragility of white people when it comes to talking about race and racism.
Di Angelo (2018) identifies issues such as “the racist = bad / not racist = good binary” (p. 100), the simplification of racism: “people just need to…” (p. 134), so-called “reverse-racism” (p. 135), as well as a “deep investment in a system that benefits us and that we have been conditioned to see as fair” and “a deep cultural legacy of anti-black sentiment” (p.100). These are only a few of the often-internalized issues that need addressing in order to “fix” the issue of racism and they are all applicable to communication for social change as well as development work itself.
Swap “racist” for “white savior”, add in the fact that development workers and scholars are unlikely to admit –or even be aware – that they are likely to have committed the sin of white saviourism, and it becomes evident.
What about the simplification of complex issues: “people just need to…”. The same desire to “fix” a complex situation with a single action solution has undoubtedly been said in NGO boardrooms, casual conversations amongst “expats” at a drinking hole.
Not to mention, the salary differences between national and international staff in development contexts is a prime example of a collective “deep investment in a system that benefits us and that we have been conditioned to see as fair”.
This is where critical thinking comes in. If we question the present state of affairs, especially our own, we can begin to understand the harm we’ve done – and continue to do, both individually and collectively.
I mean, literally question yourself:
Am I racist? Am I anti-racist? Do I notice racial stereotyping in movies, conversations, even the news? Do I laugh at racist jokes? Do I call out racist terms, objects, and assumptions when I witness them? Why or why not?
[For extra points, play swap-the-word by replacing the word “racist” with any of the following: patriarchal, misogynist, anti-feminist, xenophobic, ableist, islamophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic…]
How do I participate in the continuation of patriarchy, consumerism, and other systems that are damaging to people and the planet?
Am I being a white savior by writing about white saviourism?
Am I nothing more than a Clicktivist myself?
What am I willing to actually do to change things?
What kind of rhetoric was I immersed in whilst growing up? Did I absorb and internalize it?
Perhaps these are difficult questions to answer sincerely, but they are important, even more so for those of us working in social change or development. Some of our prejudices and/or beliefs will remain; being aware of them is key to ensuring we do no harm. As Audre Lorde said, “Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat” (Wallace-Sanders, 2002, p.67).
Reflections
The blog experiment was both a challenge and a thrill for me. Having long avoided publishing much at all online and feeling pressure to “perform” for a “public”, I resorted to one of my favourite coping mechanisms: humour.
Lucky for me, it worked. I’ll gladly claim my Clicktivism post’s high popularity as anecdotal evidence of that.
Humour, especially observational comedy, is of course not just a coping mechanism to dissolve tense feelings. It is also a friendly(er), intellectually ergonomic, sometimes subtle way to approach topics that are in fact hugely complex and problematic.
And little did I know, one of my favourite authors, bell hooks, spoke of the importance of humour in discussing feminism, which I was delighted to come across whilst researching for this post. In an interview with Yancy (2015), she said “Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community.”
I do not yet know how this exercise fits into my professional or academic writing practice, but as I navigate it all, I will read more, reflect more, have more meaningful conversations, and when I write, I will be sure to insert humour wherever possible (and appropriate), because I wholeheartedly agree with hooks (2015): “We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor”.
References
Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 783-790.
Adichie, Chimamanda (2009) The Danger of a Single Story, TED
Ahmed, Sara (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge.
Chouliaraki, Lilie (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cole, Teju (2012, 21 March), The White-Savior Industrial Complex, The Atlantic
Cooney-Petro, Elizabeth Smith (2016) Branding White Saviorism: The Ethics and Irony of Humanitarian Discourse on Instagram . Theses – ALL. 316.
DiAngelo, Robin J. (2018) White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston: Beacon Press.
hooks, bell (1992), Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press.
Hopkins, S. (2018) UN celebrity ‘It’ girls as public relations-ised humanitarianism, International Communication Gazette 80:3, 273-292
Kapur, Ratna (2006) “Human Rights in the 21st Century: Take a Walk on the Dark Side” 28(4) Sydney Law Review 665
Newkirk, Pamela (2015, 3 June), The man who was caged in a zoo, The Guardian
Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly (2002) Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, University of Michigan Press.