To: Yale “People Against Police Brutality”
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: “White Saviorism”
Dear PAPB,
A panel composed of social justice warriors from your campus recently indulged in one of the great twisted pleasures of Urban Progressive Privilege; intersectionalizing every corner of life.
You the plague of “white saviorism” – honkies who mistake “interacting in any way with non-white-communities” as “good”.
A five-person panel discussed how white supremacy and the idea of of the “white savior” affect the operations of nonprofits in New Haven and across the United States on Wednesday night at the Afro-American Cultural Center. Over the course of an hour, panelists described to the packed house the prototypical white savior who does not truly understand or meet a community’s needs, applying the concept to the nonprofit sector.
“The nonprofit industrial complex is very real and very alive in New Haven and needs to be dismantled just like any other oppressive system,” said Kerry Ellington, organizer for People Against Police Brutality. “White folks are centering themselves in these spaces and don’t know how to listen to the communities they serve.”
Normally, I’d be snarking at the bloodless identitymongering involved in a claim like this.
But today, I just want to draw your attention to these people. If “white saviorism” is what you’re jabbering about, they really really qualify.
Go to it.
That is all.
In the olden days, that was known as White Man’s Burden: the duty owed by civilized and prosperous people to poor, ignorant savages to assist their societies in reaching civic adulthood. The governments in places where it was vigorously applied – India, Bermuda – stand in marked contrast to their regional neighbors.
Was it all a mistake? Should we turn away from the rest of the world and let them solve their own problems? In the olden days, that was known as Isolationism or Putting America First. I thought Liberals were against that?
It’s so hard to keep up.