Last evening an interaction aroused a familiar discomfort within me. Three words – White saviour complex.
An older (white) woman who I am close to was telling me about this book she was reading, about this Spanish man who goes to India – Sees poverty, sadness, orphans, prostitutes ( basically the reality of life outside a bubble of privelege) and gets super fucking sad. His heart is broken but he is determined to ‘do something’ so he goes back to his country, sells all his earthly possessions, comes back to India and buys an orphanage. Then he writes this book with the same name, it becomes a best seller and a strategy to get other people with white saviour complexes to donate money to the ‘good man’ for his ‘good cause’. This woman I was talking to even said – “he looks like Jesus” ( how much more blatantly saviour can you get?)
So apparently this guy is ‘doing a hell lotta good’ for the poor children in India, his organisation is called Bombay smiles – but for some reason I can’t get my self to smile at this selfless Spanish Jesus. The field of ‘development’makes money of this saviour complex. People are always going to the ‘third world’ to make lives better there. Everyone wants change but no one wants to change anything where they are, it’s always oh let’s save the poor children in ‘ Africa’, or let’s change women’s lives in India, oh let’s teach farmers in Colombia. While back home, everything is a mess and people are hungry and dying too, they just look different and so its not as sexy to help them.
But then this woman who told me this story also said something else that complicated my feelings and got me thinking… She said ” I love people who do such things, they see a problem and then they go solve it, face it head on and change it.” Okay now that is also a White privelege way of putting things, the whole ‘be proactive discourse’, despite that I couldn’t help but feel that maybe she had a point there. It’s nice to criticise. It’s easy( not always easy to voice it) and it’s very important to. But what then? I am one of those people who will stand up and call out a white saviour complex when I see one, but then what? I have disturbed the situation, which is great, I am feeling empowered, which is great but the poor orphan kids will probably still be poor and maybe worse off even.
And while it’s not enough to sell all your belongings and go save poor children in another country, it’s not enough to problematise this either. Something needs to change, but what? I have no clue yet, for now I stay disturbed… and maybe thereby on the right way.
Lived Intersectionalities 