Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal
Volume 11, Number 1, 2015
SPECIAL ISSUE: THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN ‘AFTER RACE’
Introduction: ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Post-Racial
Humanitarianism
David Jefferess
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
This special issue addresses the question of how racial thinking continues to
inform humanitarianism and international development. Scholars such as White
(2002) and Kothari (2006) have identified the “silence” about race in
development ideologies and practices. How racism and racial thinking inform the
historical conditions that produce and maintain material inequality in the world is
silenced, and there is a silence about how humanitarian expertise and ethical
responsibility are tied to notions of whiteness. While the title of Kipling’s 1899
poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, continues to provide shorthand for the critique
of the white saviour mentality in humanitarian initiatives, just as commonly the
phrase is invoked simply to identify the paternalistic nature of the development
enterprise. Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden (2006), for instance, focuses on
the failure of development aid to effect positive economic change. Despite the
title, Easterly does not however engage with how racial thinking informs
international development.
Indeed, as Wilson (2011, p. 316) describes, in the post-1945 development era,
“as the binary oppositions of race went ‘underground’ within dominant
discourses, they were mapped onto those of development and
underdevelopment.” Instead of talking about race and racism, the philanthropic
discourses of humanitarianism and development acknowledge the importance of
‘culture’ or ‘ethnicity’ in project countries, and distinguish between ‘indigenous’
recipients of aid and ‘expatriate’ benefactors (Kothari, 2006, p. 18). The
humanitarian mindset acknowledges racial thinking as only a historical
phenomenon, and typically postulates racism as something that has been
overcome (p. 19). Hence, humanitarian and development discourses reinforce a
post-racial ideal within a progressive developmental narrative: racism is no
longer recognised as a cause or condition of global poverty, race-thinking is
attributed to ‘cultures’ and ‘ethnicities’ in the Global South, and, indeed, the
humanitarian ethic reflects the achievement of a humanist ideal, the
transcendence of racial thinking to value and care for all humans. Yet, while
ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2015
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
humanitarianism purports to colour-blindness, its structures of representation
reflect a paradox. For instance, in child sponsorship advertisements, the child ‘in
need’ must reflect an ideal of universal childhood, yet their ‘need’ is distinguished
in part by how they must look “‘different’ or ‘ethnic’ to show that they are ‘Other’
children” (Dogra, 2012, p. 36). This post-racial paradox of humanitarianism is
captured succinctly by a critic of the Kony 2012 campaign who Leonard cites in
his contribution to this issue: “How can they be racist when they want to help so
badly?” (cited in Leonard, 2015, p. 5).
This special issue is entitled “The White Man’s Burden ‘After Race’” in order to
highlight the racial paradox at the core of contemporary humanitarian discourse:
humanitarianism is posited as modelling post-racial ethics, yet, as the
contributions to this issue show, racial thinking continues to structure
humanitarian discourse. The four essays provide examples of distinct modes of
humanitarian practice in distinct local contexts: fundraising initiatives in
Denmark (Christiansen), social media activism in the United States (Leonard),
nutrition and health policy in Canada (Burnett, Hay, and Chambers), and the
social construction of white women development workers in Tanzania and Kenya
(Gross). While the articles each provide insight into the way humanitarianism
continues to inflect notions of whiteness, they emphasise the local contexts for
these racial formations, and particularly the influence of liberal multicultural
discourses that promote a colour-blind ideal. As Eng (2008, p. 1480) notes, since
the emergence of racial thinking in the European Enlightenment, “race has
always appeared as disappearing,” and, I would argue, humanitarianism has
always been figured as a harbinger of the disappearance of race and as the
antithesis of racism. From the British and American movements to abolish the
slave trade and slavery, to Dunant’s advocacy for what would become the
International Committee of the Red Cross, to the figure of Albert Schweitzer
sacrificing fame and fortune in Europe to care for the ill in Gabon,
humanitarianism has been associated with compassion and care for others
regardless of ‘difference.’ Yet, ironically, each of these historical examples of
humanitarianism may also be seen to affirm white racial superiority, wherein
responsibility is understood not so much as to an other in need as much as “to
the moral integrity of one’s own class of humanity” (Slaughter, 2009, p. 103).
The contributors to this issue take up this problem in the contemporary moment:
Leonard argues that social media activism structures racially segregated
communities that allow the pleasure of imagining an anti-racist self; Christiansen
analyses how humanitarianism becomes a core characteristic of Danish national
identity, as articulated through ideals of solidarity with African struggles and
through the image of a racially diverse national community; Burnett, Hay, and
Chambers examine how contemporary settler colonial policies of assimilation are
defined in terms of humanitarian care; and, Gross examines how white women
development workers in East Africa must confront the particular ways their
bodies are coded as wealthy and providing opportunity. These four essays
provide important insights into how racial thinking and racism continue to inform
humanitarian practices, and they reflect the need for further analysis of the
complicated ways that humanitarianism and development continue, ironically, to
affirm social inequalities. In this Introduction, I highlight some of the key insights
of these contributions while providing a broad overview of the context for an
examination of the ‘white man’s burden’ in contemporary humanitarian and
development practice.
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
‘The White Man’s Burden’, today …
The question of race and racism is taken up within humanitarianism and
international development, today, most overtly in relation to non-governmental
organisation (NGO) marketing practices. The negative image of the child ‘in
need’ is no longer the norm in humanitarian marketing. That stereotypical image
of the impoverished (racialised as not white) child—dirty, in tattered clothes,
looking desperate and forlorn—has been largely replaced by the ‘positive image’
of the (racialised as not white) child who has benefited from humanitarian aid. In
part, this shift may be attributed to the introspection that humanitarian and
development agencies undertook in the wake of criticism of the way the 1984
Ethiopian famine was represented in media and NGO marketing. For instance, in
its report, “The Live Aid Legacy: The Developing World Through British Eyes”
(2002), the British NGO Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) outlines the way in
which British perceptions of the “developing world” rely upon demeaning
stereotypes and a narrative in which the British are figured as morally superior,
generous givers, while people in the “developing world” are regarded as not fully
human, grateful recipients. The VSO report does not characterise these
stereotypical images, or this narrative framework, as racist. Significantly, the
problem addressed in the report is that of (mis)representation, the report is
concerned with challenging “our sometimes lazy assumptions of the developing
world” and with the urgent need to “rebalance the picture” (p. 15). The report’s
conclusion argues for the need to “emphasise a common humanity” but the work
of “building a global community” is attributed to VSO volunteers (p. 15). The
development enterprise is above question, and the critique of media stereotypes
of Africa is used to affirm the organisation and, ultimately, humanitarian
benevolence.
The practice of being charitable and providing aid has long been associated with
the performance of whiteness in Western cultures (Ryan, 2005; Laforteza,
2007). In this sense, “whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within
reach. By objects we would include not just physical objects, but also styles,
capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 154). The shift to
more ‘positive images’ in humanitarian marketing is no less demeaning or
implicitly racist, for the success and accomplishments of the recipient of aid are
presented as only possible through the care and material gifts of, primarily,
white benefactors. Further, seeking to fix the way global poverty is represented
by focusing on the relative negativity or positivity of the image of the
impoverished—with or without identifying the problem as one of racism—is not
the same as contending with structures of racial privilege and power. It does not
address the way humanitarianism provides a capacity, technique, or habit of
whiteness, wherein the white humanitarian defines both the Other and the
problem, and imagines the humanitarian self as (only) a solution.
As Chouliaraki (2013) contends through the notion of post-humanitarianism,
humanitarian marketing now often centres emotional fulfilment gained through
humanitarian feeling. Post-humanitarianism “blurs the boundary” between the
“public logic of economic utilitarianism, applicable in the sphere of commodity
exchange” and the “private logic of sentimental obligation to vulnerable others”
by commoditizing “private emotion and philanthropic obligation” (pp. 5-6). Yet,
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
even if humanitarianism seems increasingly concerned with the ‘uplift’ of the
(Western/Northern) self, this sense of fulfilment is still constituted against the
Other ‘in need’ elsewhere. The self-affirmation for the humanitarian subject of
‘being the change’ is dependent upon the idea of that Other who ‘lacks’ and
whose possibilities in life are dependent upon Northern benevolence (Jefferess,
2008, 2012). This self-affirmation is derived from a variety of actions, including
‘sponsoring’ a child, building a school in a ‘developing country,’ fundraising to
purchase goats or invest in microfinance programs, or through various modes of
‘clicktivism’ and ‘causumerism’, such as signing online petitions, joining online
movements such as the Girl Effect, or purchasing Tom’s shoes or from the Me to
We Style Collection.1 As Singer (2010, p. 173) argues in his treatise on the moral
obligations the ‘fortunate’ have for those ‘in need,’ the little commitment
necessary to “save a life” is “more rewarding than you imagined possible.”
Although advocates of a humanitarian ethic for responding to global poverty,
such as Singer, rarely affirm whiteness overtly, their arguments often rely on a
similar moralising rationale as that articulated by Kipling in his poem. This
burden is overtly paternalistic, focuses on the humanitarian’s sacrifice, and
objectifies an unfortunate Other in need of ‘empowerment’. Written more than
100 years ago to prevail upon the United States its imperial obligations as a
‘white nation’ to export (white) civilisation, Kipling’s invocation continues to
resonate today as a way of understanding the Northern burden to care,
particularly in its seemingly post-humanitarian forms. For instance, in their
critique of the (RED) campaign—an initiative in which proceeds from the
purchase of certain products are directed to the “fight against AIDS”2—both
Magubane (2008) and Richey and Ponte (2011) revise Kipling’s phrase—as the
“(Product) Red Man’s Burden” and the “Rock Man’s Burden”, respectively—to
articulate the way humanitarian ethics, consumerism, and the celebrity model of
benevolence are intertwined. While ‘whiteness’ is removed from this new
formulation of the humanitarian’s burden, these critics uncover the post-racial
assumptions of celebrity humanitarianism. (RED)’s linking of consumerism with
philanthropy—which Magubane notes is consistent with Kipling’s emphasis on
Christianity, Civilisation, and Commerce—is seemingly inclusive, defined not by
race but by morality (and means). The Vanity Fair issue that helped to launch
the (RED) initiative, for instance, included a genetic map that traced all of the
contributors to their “African roots”, which Richey and Ponte identify as
imagining a cosmopolitan human community based on shared origins (p. 71). In
her analysis of celebrity endorsements of (RED), Magubane focuses on how Bono
and Oprah, as humanitarian figures, are aligned with the colonised rather than
colonisers. Bono refuses to acknowledge his own racial privilege, instead
associating himself with Irish struggles against colonisation, while Oprah
emphasises “her personal pain, caused by a history of racism and discrimination
against all Africans and African Americans that motivates her philanthropy,” and
specifically her emphasis on education as the antidote to poverty (p. 7).
Humanitarian benevolence, in these examples, is actively disassociated from the
figure of the white saviour.
1
See http://www.girleffect.org/; http://www.toms.ca/; and
http://www.metowestyle.com/.
2
See: http://www.red.org/en/about.
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
While these critics trace complicated articulations of race in contemporary
manifestations of the argument for a humanitarian burden to care, there is a
relatively small, but significant body of scholarship that seeks to specifically
address the way contemporary humanitarianism continues to be informed by,
and reassert, discourses of white supremacy: for instance, Goudge’s The
Whiteness of Power: Racism in Third World Development and Aid (2003),
Razack’s Dark Threats, White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the
New Imperialism (2004), Heron’s Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender,
and the Helping Imperative (2007), and Mahrouse’s Conflicted Commitments:
Race, Privilege, and Power in Solidarity Activism (2014). Importantly, what
draws these analyses together is the recognition that racism needs to be
understood not only in terms of overtly white supremacist imagery but that racial
thinking informs the very basis of the humanitarian enterprise. This distinction is
summed up well by Teju Cole (2012), in his widely circulated critique of the Kony
2012 video phenomenon, which he characterised as an example of “The WhiteSavior Industrial Complex.” Many critics of the campaign identified Kony 2012’s
use of overtly racist tropes of the Saviour, the Victim, and the Savage (Mutua,
2013). As Cole reminds us, within a wide range of narratives and practices, from
humanitarian marketing, to life writing, to film, to voluntourism, “Africa has
provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected” (2012).
The problem with the Kony 2012 video was the way in which (white) American
youth were invited to see themselves as saviours, protecting innocent, and
powerless, (black) children from sinister (black) criminals.
The “White-Savior Industrial Complex” conceives of complicated problems of
gross material inequality and suffering as simply problems of care. Cole writes:
“All he [the saviour] sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need
for need” (2012). Humanitarianism can be understood as an orientation of
whiteness, in part because it affirms the caring subject while refusing to
recognise the racialised trajectories of global material inequality and its apparent
solution, humanitarianism. In his engagement with how Kony 2012 relied on
social media, Leonard, in this issue, argues for the way this orientation is
reaffirmed by online activism that structures segregated communities of
individualised care and action that prevents critical interrogation of position,
privilege, or complicity; hence, facebook activism foreclosed the possibility of
seeking to understand the “need for need”. Similarly, in their analysis of
Canadian government food subsidy programs and nutrition education initiatives
in Northern Indigenous communities, Burnett, Hay, and Chambers, in this issue,
argue for the connection between humanitarianism and settler colonialism in
Canadian policy, wherein ‘need’ is understood as inherent to Indigenous
communities, rather than a consequence of colonialism.
Post-Racial Humanitarianism
There is certainly a significant body of scholarship that centres the critique of
humanitarianism as whiteness. However, scholarship on and advocacy for
humanitarianism and development tend to ignore racial thinking and race, define
structures of difference and inequality in other terms, or, indeed, overtly reject
racism as a contemporary problem. Rieff (2002, p. 50), for instance, contends
that “though activists sometimes claim otherwise, [the difficulty of empathizing]
is at most only tangentially a matter of racism.” Rieff rationalises the failure of
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
the Northern burden to care for suffering in Congo or Afghanistan as a lack of
connection, the quality the people of these countries share with the potential
Northern humanitarian is only the “brute fact of their humanity”: “these
tragedies simply take place at too great a remove. From the unfamiliar
countryside or urban landscape to the unpronounceable names of the people,
warlords and refugees alike” (p. 50). Ironically, these are precisely codes of
racialised difference, and indeed the characterisation of the wars in Congo and
Afghanistan as “tragedies” seems to ignore their historical contexts, and
specifically the role of Western economic, political, and military intervention.
Rieff is by no means alone in disregarding, or at least minimising, the
significance of race and racism to the humanitarian endeavour (Jefferess, 2011
p. 78; 2012, p. 20). Significantly, though, Rieff’s concern focuses on the
insufficiency of the ideal of a shared humanity to effect action, and hence the
difficulty of enacting a humanitarian post-racial ethic.
While humanitarian agencies define their work in different ways, the principles of
humanity, impartiality, neutrality—among the core principles of the International
Committee of the Red Cross—reflect the long-standing post-racial ideal of
humanitarianism. The obligation to care for those who suffer cannot be limited
by notions of difference. As Barnett (2011, p. 64) contends in narrating a history
of humanitarianism, early Christian missionary interventions should be seen as
rejecting “biological theories of race, [for] they believed in a fundamental unity
of humankind.” Barnett critically engages with humanitarianism’s history of
paternalism, but he does not engage with its historical associations with
whiteness or with the way it has been informed by racial thinking. Indeed,
Barnett’s analysis is marked by some of the key features of the post-racial ideal,
namely the attribution of racial thinking and racism, today, to those who are in
need of aid. For instance, a key failing of Médicins sans Frontières (MSF) in the
lead up to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he argues, was that they were
“purposely oblivious to the politics of ethnicity” (p. 202) in Rwanda. The politics
of ethnicity (read: racial thinking) is presented as informing Rwandan social
realities but not international relations, or the policies and practices of Northern
international non-government organisations (INGOs).
As a number of critics have suggested (Dirlik, 2008; Gilroy, 2000; Goldberg,
2002), contemporary racism takes on a different form from earlier
manifestations; indeed, the new rhetoric of racism does not mention race
(Williams, 1997, p. 41). While there are a number of ways of defining this
colour-blind politics, and it is important to be attentive to the way in which postracial ideals are situated in particular national or regional contexts, Mamdani
(2005) characterises contemporary international politics in terms of “Culture
Talk”, wherein racial categories have been replaced by the categories of the
‘modern,’ the ‘not-yet-modern’ (to be saved) and the ‘anti-modern’ (to be
defeated). The ‘modern’, here, is associated with apparently race-neutral
concepts such as democracy, meritocracy, equity and multicultural inclusion.
Hence, Australia can be constructed as race-blind, having transformed from a
white settler colonial state to an inclusive and tolerant pluralist society (MoretonRobinson, 2004). Or, the United States can be portrayed as “a post-racial nation
in which all the promises of black civil rights struggles have been fulfilled”
(M’Baye, 2011, p. 6). So, post-racialism literally connotes the idea that racialthinking, debunked as a biological theory of essential difference, has been
relegated to the past, replaced by new structures of relation and inclusion. It also
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
reflects the way contemporary racism is attributed to individual attitudes rather
than structures and institutions. So, within a post-racial frame, overt
articulations of white racism can be condemned but not structures of white
privilege. As such, it emphasises individualism over collective identities (M’Baye,
2011, p. 6).
Within this post-racial rhetoric, the not-yet-modern or anti-modern subject is
regarded as limited by their own affiliation with group identities, their
monoculturalism, and their inability to be inclusive or to be included (Melamed,
2011). For instance, in the humanitarian encounter, racism is identified as
something experienced by white volunteers in their interactions with people in
Nicaragua (Goudge, 2003, p. 52, 79). The new civilising mission, then, is defined
overtly in the terms of post-racialism, as development connotes moving from
group to individual identities and from monocultural patriotism to multicultural
global citizenship. In this issue, Christiansen specifically addresses the way in
which the moral authority of humanitarianism is reliant upon constructions of
Danish pluralism and inclusivity. The presence of celebrity spokespeople with
African roots as part of the annual Danish aid telethon reinforces Danish national
pride, as an inclusive multicultural community, and provides testimony to the
effectiveness of aid.
Humanitarianism needs to be seen as inclusive and as modelling colour-blindness
rather than the ‘white man’s burden’, which is why Kony 2012 was so much
more controversial than the myriad of other normalised initiatives and
organisations that speak for and on behalf of the suffering of the world.
Humanitarianism provides a key manifestation of post-racialism, in addition to
the sorts of institutions and attitudes that Melamed and M’Baye attribute to the
idea. Humanitarian identification provides a “signature of modernity”,
differentiating the caring subject from those who are cared for, both in the
material terms of capability and the ethical terms of benevolence (Jefferess,
2011). My attempts to theorise post-racial humanitarianism have been indebted
to a range of critical interventions into humanitarian discourse, including
Kapoor’s The Postcolonial Politics of Development (2008), Fassin’s Humanitarian
Reason (2012) and Chouliaraki’s The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of
Post-Humanitarianism (2013). Significantly, however, racial thinking and racism
are not central to these analyses. For instance, Kapoor (2008) frames his critique
of foreign aid, as gift, in terms of constructions of the “generous nation.”
Similarly, while Fassin (2012) acknowledges the distinction between the foreign
staff of humanitarian organisations, who are “almost always Western and white”,
and local staff (p. 240), his theorisation of the complex ontology of inequality at
the heart of humanitarianism does not acknowledge racialisation. Fassin’s
humanitarian “politics of life” differentiates between the humanitarian subject,
who risks their life in the cause of care, determines whose lives can be saved and
who must be sacrificed, and speaks of and for those who suffer, against those
whose lives can be saved: “Physically, there is no difference between them;
philosophically, they are worlds apart” (2012, p. 231). As significant as the work
of Fassin, for instance, has been to revealing the ethical paradox of the
humanitarian endeavour, there is a potential danger in the universalisation of the
modern humanitarian subject as beyond race.
Recognising the privilege of the Western citizen humanitarian because they hold
a British, Canadian, or Danish passport, is crucial, as it reflects the way race, and
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
specifically whiteness, is tied to specific institutional structures of privilege, and
that sometimes these privileges are not only held by bodies that are racialised as
white. However, racial thinking continues to play a part in both the different
motivations for, and experiences of, humanitarianism that differently situated
subjects may have. For instance, Magubane (2008) contrasts her analysis of
Bono and Oprah with Don Cheadle, an African-American actor who has been at
the forefront of a number of humanitarian initiatives, including the Save Darfur
Coalition, and for whom racism is identified as a key condition of the suffering he
seeks to alleviate. In an interview, Cheadle discusses how African American
commitments to alleviating suffering in Africa may be understood in terms of
shared experiences of racism and disenfranchisement, as well as the way Africa
figures as a homeland (pp. 17-18). These motivations may be contrasted with
narratives associated with white benevolence, which often dehistoricise the
burden to care through the ideal of a shared common humanity or the
responsibility of the ‘fortunate’ to ‘give back’ or ‘sacrifice’ in order to help the
‘unfortunate.’ In a different vein, Charania (2011, p. 362) reflects on how women
of colour from the Global North may feel affiliation and solidarity with the
struggles of people in the Global South, but it is important to grapple with “our
own complicities as racialized Northerners in North-South relations.”
While Fassin’s argument for the humanitarian “politics of life” may largely hold
true, the humanitarian encounter is a racialising experience. Ahmed (2002, p.
562) argues race is not an essential identity but that racial differentiation is
produced through specific encounters. For instance, because development
expertise, knowledge, or simply access to material goods has been associated
with the white body, humanitarian actors of colour may be met with
disappointment by “local counterparts” or their knowledge and expertise
devalued “in the field” (Kothari, 2006, pp. 16-17). In other encounters, expatriots who are racialised as not white in their home country may be
characterised as European or white in the development context (Zimmerman,
1995, p. 1016). This encounter has impacts for bodies that are racialised as
white as well, as their value increases simply by crossing borders (White, 2002,
p. 409; see also Goudge, 2003). For some, this may be a destabilising
experience, as they feel much more visible or under scrutiny due to their race,
sometimes having to acknowledge their racialised identity for the first time. This
experience is often articulated in terms of white guilt and the disconnect between
Western ideals of individual responsibility and the recognition of historical and
structural relations of privilege and value. In this issue, Gross takes up the
complicated experience of white women volunteers. Working in Kenyan and
Tanzanian development projects, these women must grapple with their
hypervisibility as white Northern citizens, embodying the foreign, material
privilege, and mobility. Contending with theories of the normative construction of
whiteness in the North, Gross shows how whiteness functions as a transnational
site of privilege, figuring the model to which others must aspire.
For the white volunteers, this encounter can be experienced in a way that
attributes racial thinking and racism to the nation-sites of humanitarian and
development projects, in contrast to the perceived colour-blind or multicultural
‘home.’ Racial differentiation, however, continues to be indicative of the
humanitarian encounter, itself. Warah, for instance, reflects on her experience
working with the United Nations in Afghanistan. Because of her appearance she
is read as a local rather than a fellow development worker by other ex-patriots
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
(Warah, 2008, p. 18). Similarly, while humanitarian workers from
Western/Northern countries increasingly reflect the racial diversity of these
countries, the institutional structures of development NGO’s often continue to
affirm whiteness, particularly in leadership positions, and do not model the
diversity of their humanitarian ideals (Ojelay-Surtees, 2004; Ohri, 1997). In this
issue, Christiansen and Gross each examine various kinds of humanitarian
encounters, wherein racialised identities become crucial to the articulation of
what it means to be humanitarian. In contrast, Leonard argues that facebook
activism subverts the possibility of encounters between people of different
racialised positions, serving to affirm the colour-blind ideals of white supporters
of the Kony 2012 campaign.
*
*
*
In closing, the four articles in this special issue provide a diverse range of
engagements with the racial politics of the development project, and particularly
how humanitarianism continues to affirm whiteness, despite the association of
humanitarianism with post-racial ideals. One significant thread that ties them
together, and which marks an intervention in scholarship in racial thinking and
racism within humanitarianism, is the way that they each situate the post-racial
ideals of humanitarianism within particular social contexts. Leonard situates the
humanitarian ideals of Kony 2012, as a social media phenomenon, against the
reality that black civil rights have not been attained in the United States, and
specifically in relation to twitter campaigns exposing police violence against
young black men, including social activism that has formed under the hashtag
#BlackLivesMatter. Christiansen analyses the annual Danish aid telethon,
Danmarks Insamling in terms of the cultural imaginary of Denmark, which she
contrasts with that of the United States or the United Kingdom, which often are
posited as representing the North more broadly. Gross analyses the experiences
of white women volunteers in the context of structures of racial and gender
identity in Kenya and Tanzania in a way that brings into greater visibility the
expectations, and indeed entitlements, of race and gender that the women
experience in their home countries. And, finally, Burnett, Hay and Chambers
argue that contemporary Canadian government nutrition and health initiatives in
northern Indigenous communities reflect ongoing settler colonial ideology. As
these articles reveal, the ‘white man’s burden’ has taken on new guises in the
twenty-first century, and the racialised structures of humanitarianism and
development are more complicated, and tenuous, than in the cultural
imagination that Kipling’s poem reflects.
Author Note
David Jefferess lives in the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx people.
He is a non-Indigenous scholar who teaches in the areas of decolonisation and
global inter-relationships at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan
campus. His current research focuses on humanitarian discourses, and the
particular way in which they imagine social relations of power.
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the many referees who provided
assessments of the submissions for this special issue, and who shared such
constructive and valuable insight to the contributors. I would also like to thank
Holly Randell-Moon for her support and keen critical insights throughout the
process of putting together the issue, as well as to Stevie Jepson for her
meticulous copy-editing of the articles.
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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal
Volume 11, Number 1, 2015
GENERAL ISSUE
Editorial
Holly Randell-Moon
University of Otago
Alongside the collection of essays on whiteness, humanitarianism and
international development are general essays by Maria Elena Indelicato, Saladdin
Ahmed and Scott M. Schönfeldt-Aultman. Indelicato considers how the ‘Colombo
Plan’, an initiative of Australian governments to provide ‘aid’ for international
students, is premised on the discursive, structural and geopolitical exercise of
goodwill and benevolence towards Australia’s Asia-Pacific neighbours. Such
benevolence rearticulates the colonial imagining of these neighbours as ‘lacking’
in the cultural and pedagogical attributes of local students, a lack that crucially
constructs non-English speaking migrants and Indigenous peoples as likewise
educationally inferior. She suggests that international students ought to find
ways to link their contestation of their differential treatments under the
Australian education system to critical reflections on the erasure of Indigenous
sovereignty as the basis upon which citizenship rights in Australian are made.
Ahmed focuses on the notion of culturalisation “as a common new-racist method
of de-politicising the Other’s affairs and surrounding socio-political phenomena”
(p. 1). Such uses of culturalisation have resulted in Leftist political rhetoric and
practice becoming complicit in new racist discourse which entrenches, rather
than contests, ‘cultural’ attributes as intrinsic to non-white ethnic peoples and
communities. The essay offers a provocation to think beyond the world’s
communities as fundamentally different via culture and to build a common
platform for justice that also attends to local specificities of difference and
inequality. Finally, Schönfeldt-Aultman considers the defensive rhetorics
deployed by ex-patriot South Africans to de-legitimise contemporary and
historical articulations of racism and white privilege in the United States and their
former home. Together with this special issue, these papers reveal the
pedagogical implications of the ways in which white benevolence is supported
and given valence through various institutional contexts.
Author Note
ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2015
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11.1
Holly Randell-Moon is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University
of Otago, New Zealand, located in the traditional lands of the Ngāi Tahu and
other iwi. She has published on race, religion, and secularism in the journals
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, borderlands and Social Semiotics and in the
edited book collections Religion, Spirituality and the Social Sciences (2008) and
Mediating Faiths (2010). Her publications on popular culture, gender, and
sexuality have appeared in the edited book collections Common Sense:
Intelligence as Presented on Popular Television (2008) and Television Aesthetics
and Style (2013) and the journals Feminist Media Studies and Refractory. She is
the editor of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the support of the ACRAWSA Executive and Stevie Jepson for
their assistance in helping to put this special and general issue together.
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