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Tuesday 31 October 2017

Rights and Charity

What is white saviour-ism? This was the discussion I had with two friends on the program at the bus stop and bus on the way home. None of us had a proper answer, although I thought about it a little more on the way home, which is why I wanted to type out my thoughts on the subject. Although I still have no formal conclusions on it (or any other social concept really), I thought things I had not thought of before. One is the disconnect between calling things like education and clean water ‘rights’ when the donor funding for it is called ‘charity’. This I feel, is one of the sources of white saviour-ism (of which I am also guilty of). For me, there is no ‘charity’ when it involves money flowing from white, western countries, to formerly colonized states. It’s returning money and resources and culture and dignity, all of which were siphoned away by force. A force that was in a sense, arbitrarily given and bestowed by great thinkers in the right places with flooded coal mines. In other words, in our contemporary sense, ‘illegitimate’. Of course, you can disagree on that front, and I think yes, society in general does somehow give all these concepts of ‘social justice’ weight and relevance. Without a collective agreement on what is right and wrong, who is to say what is right or wrong?

Back to it, if I were to join an NGO working to ‘rebuild’ or ‘uplift’ communities ravaged by poverty, disease, mismanagement and going further back, colonialism, I must believe myself to be the shameful one. The shameful one because I grew up easy and because we have to reverse/restore the power dynamic between the foreigner and local in such places. We must be convicted to our contemporary sense of social justice of restoring a wrong, and not ‘I do this because it is the right thing to do’ - somehow conveniently forgetting or ignoring ‘how we got here in the first place.’ Obviously, so many factors play into the ‘global’ problems of today, including by ‘locals themselves’. But many, or a significant amount that has not been corrected, can be traced to colonialism. What are we hoping for in the end? A restoration of positive liberty - the ability for an individual to, through his or her own agency, change his socio-economic position in life. It doesn’t matter if there are laws protecting free speech if psychologically or financially, communities are undermined in using those rights.


It’s not charity, it’s returning what we (or our ancestors/nations/peoples) stole - what our birth-right lottery dispositions give us are all built in some way on that exploitation and have nothing to do with the people today, except by its effects. Although we cannot (and should not) correct inequality in general, I feel that we must restore the basic rights that people would have if not for war, genocide and unchecked, mercantilist exploitation. These are all fancy and lofty words and ideals of course, but I think we must hold them in mind when doing so-called ‘charity’, so that we never misplace our sense of righteousness. It’s not just about ‘being born lucky, with all these opportunities given to me’, it’s about recognizing that those opportunities came at a cost - to others, probably. And if we are not ready to deal with that as individuals - because after all, even people born with privilege didn’t technically choose to be born with it - then so be it, but we should acknowledge that they (the opportunities we were granted) are there for arbitrary historical reasons, and that not correcting them even though we know this, is kind of selfish. Perhaps even, ‘donors’ should be called ‘people who are returning resources that would not have been theirs if not for racism mixed with cannon fire and chattel slavery’. [I wrote this a while back and can’t remember if I had more to say or was just rambling, either way wanted to get this on before I forget]

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