Week 08a Writing Tip: Generate Possibilities –
At the beginning of this quarter, we shared Bruce Lee’s Daoist instruction for us to “be water.” In offering this command, Lee gives us a choice – to confront the obstacles in our way or to move around them. We have sought to offer you this same choice this quarter as we recognize the identity-based social obstacles that prevent us from being our whole selves and well. What is it that we can do? How will you decide what you should do? As we discussed last week with age, taking up our agency means to have and to use our ability to understand our context, to develop opportunities for ourselves to make choices, and then to learn and continue growing future opportunities to be whole and well and to continue choosing to be whole and well.
And thinking beyond ourselves, what does it look like to apply this same choice to how we engage with others in seeking to be in just relationship with them? What does it mean to attempt to be allies in solidarity with others? When other people seek to support us and support our wholeness and wellness, what do we say to them? When we seek to do this for others, what do we ask them in order to decide what to do? And in both cases, how do we learn through these situations, especially if our impact does not match our intentions? How do we hold ourselves and each other accountable to being in just relationship?
I am posting the files
For this week, we assigned four required resources: Cole (2012), Lorde (2007), Strauss (2015), and Yousafzai (2014). You were then to pick two of the remaining six resources. Take five minutes now to reflect on the resources you read/watched and then answer the following questions:
· What are the choices and moves being made in the resource by the author? What’s the call to action the audience?
· How does context matter in the resource? When and where is the resource being presented? Who’s the audience?
· In what ways is this agency? In what ways is this allyship? In what ways might this be justice or injustice?
Once you have written out your response – again this doesn’t need to take more than 5 minutes or 100 words or so – post your response to the discussion board. Please also read other people’s posts and consider whether what they are saying – either about the resource or about their own lived experience – is a window or mirror for you. Post these thoughts as replies to their post if you are willing to connect with them and potentially continue the conversation.
Answer Sheet
Teacher: A student told me I ‘couldn’t understand because I
was a white lady.’ Here’s what I did then.
By Valerie Strauss November 24
Emily E. Smith is a fifth-grade social justice and English language arts teacher at Cunningham Elementary School in
Austin, Tex. She was just awarded the 2015 Donald H. Graves Excellence in the Teaching of Writing award given at
the National Teachers of English Language Arts Convention in Minneapolis. Smith created and founded The Hive
Society, a classroom that inspires children to creatively explore literature through critical thinking and socially
relevant texts.
In her speech accepting the award, Smith talked about a seminal moment in her career when she realized she
needed to change her approach to teaching students of color, one of whom told her that she couldn’t understand his
problems because she is white. The following is an excerpt of the speech in which she discusses her transformation
(and which I am publishing with permission).
From Smith’s speech:
I’m white. My classroom is not. Sure, it’s been my dream to work at an “urban” school. To work
with kids whose challenges I could never even fathom at such a young age. And changing at-risk
lives through literature is almost a media cliché by now. These were, however, how I identified
myself at the beginning of my teaching career. I was a great teacher. I taught children how to truly
write for the first time and share meaningful connections on a cozy carpet. We made podcasts
about music lyrics and filled our favorite books so full with annotated sticky notes that they would
barely close. We even tiptoed into the alien world of free verse poetry.
But something was missing. If you’ve already forgotten, I’m white. “White” is kind of an
uncomfortable word to announce, and right now people may already be unnerved about where this
is going. Roughly 80 percent of teachers in the United States today are white. Yet the population of
our students is a palette. That means America’s children of color will, for the majority of their
school years, not have a teacher who is a reflection of their own image. Most of their school life
they will be told what to do and how to do it by someone who is white, and most likely female.
Except for a few themed weeks, America’s children of color will read books, watch videos, analyze
documents and study historical figures who are also not in their image.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/valerie-strauss
http://hivesociety.weebly.com/
I’ve been guilty of that charge. But things changed for me the day when, during a classroom
discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I “couldn’t understand because I was a white lady.” I
had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully
understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I
did. The closest I could ever come was empathy.
My curriculum from then on shifted. We still did all of the wonderful things that I had already
implemented in the classroom, except now the literature, the documents, the videos, the
discussions, the images embodied the issues that my children wanted to explore. We studied the
works of Sandra Cisneros, Pam Munoz Ryan and Gary Soto, with the intertwined Spanish
language and Latino culture — so fluent and deep in the memories of my kids that I saw light in
their eyes I had never seen before. We analyzed Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America
Again” from the lens of both historical and current events and realized that the United States
is still the land that has never been. The land that my kids, after reading an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s letter to his son that connected so deeply to their personal experiences, decided they still
wanted to believe in. The land they decided to still hope for. The land that one of my kids quietly
said would be changed by her generation. A generation of empathy.
We read about the Syrian crisis, analyzing photographs of war-torn faces at the border and then
wrote poetry of hope, despair and compassion from the perspectives of the migrants. Many of my
kids asked to write about their own journeys across the border and their [dreams] for a better
future. One child cried and told me he never had a teacher who honored the journey his family
took to the United States. He told me he was not ashamed anymore, but instead proud of the
sacrifice his parents made for him.
We listened to StoryCorps podcasts by people from different walks of life, and children shared
their own stories of losing pets, saying goodbye to a mother or father in jail, the fear of wearing a
hoodie while walking to a 7-Eleven, and thriving under the wing of a single parent who works two
jobs.
So as I stand here today I can declare that I am no longer a language arts and social studies
teacher, but a self-proclaimed teacher of social justice and the art of communication with words.
Looking back, I think that my prior hesitation to talk about race stemmed from a lack of social
education in the classroom. A lack of diversity in my own life that is, by no means, the fault of my
progressive parents, but rather a broken and still segregated school system. Now that I’m an
educator in that system, I’ve decided to stand unflinching when it comes to the real issues facing
our children today, I’ve decided to be unafraid to question injustice, unafraid to take risks in the
classroom — I am changed. And so has my role as a teacher.
I can’t change the color of my skin or where I come from or what the teacher workforce looks like
at this moment, but I can change the way I teach. So I am going to soapbox about something after
all. Be the teacher your children of color deserve. In fact, even if you don’t teach children of color,
be the teacher America’s children of color deserve, because we, the teachers, are responsible for
instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of
this country.
So teach the texts that paint all the beautiful faces of our children and tell the stories of struggle
and victory our nation has faced. Speak openly and freely about the challenges that are taking
place in our country at this very moment. Talk about the racial and class stereotypes plaguing our
streets, our states, our society. You may agree that black and brown lives matter, but how often do
you explore what matters to those lives in your classroom?
Put aside your anxieties and accept your natural biases. Donald Graves once said, “Children need
to hang around a teacher who is asking bigger questions of herself than she is asking of them.” I
know I’m going to continue to ask the bigger questions of myself and seek the answers that
sometimes feel impossible, because my kids deserve it … you’re welcome to join me. Thank you.
(Update: removing extraneous word, “even” from this sentence: “The land that my kids, after reading an excerpt
from TaNehisi Coates’s letter to his son that connected so deeply to their personal experiences, decided they still
wanted to believe in.”
Valerie Strauss covers education and runs The Answer Sheet blog.
The Post Recommends
Don’t eat that shrimp
There’s a serious problem with the shrimp sold at just about every grocery
store in the United States.
Huge fire engulfs high-rise hotel in downtown Dubai
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/15/the-shocking-truth-about-shrimp-today/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/31/huge-fire-engulfs-hotel-in-downtown-dubai/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_2_na
The Transformation of
Silence into Language
and Action*
I HAVE cOME to believe over and over again that what is most
important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even
at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the
speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here
as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon
the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than
two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one
male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there
was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant.
Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three,
week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of
my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was
benign.
But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon
myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has
left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced
by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I ex,
perienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of
what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into
language and action.
• Pa per delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,”
Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sini.Her Wisdom 6 (1978) and
The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco , 1980).
TRANSFORMATION OF SILENCE 41
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality,
and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it
might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a
merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of
what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I be,
lieved could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so
many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or
end . Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that
might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I
had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed
myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or
waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a
source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge
that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put
fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I
had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me.
Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word
spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths
for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other
women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we
all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern
and caring of all those women which gave me strength and
enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
The women who sustained me through that period were
Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and
heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of
silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which
I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute
fear came the knowledge – within the war we are all waging
with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not
-I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need
to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at,
tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them,
still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face
of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black,
because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a Black woman
40
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warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing
yours?
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence
into language and action is an act of self~revelation, and that
always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told
her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell th~m ~bout
how you’re never really a whole person if you rematn stle,!tt,
because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants
to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, i; gets m~dder and
madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don t speak 1t out one
day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own
fear _ fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or
recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of al:, I
think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly hv~.
Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, tf
unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand
always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have
been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of
racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to
fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us
mas; vulnerable our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of
this dragon we ~all america, we have had to learn this first and
most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as
human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Blac~
or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable 1s
that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because
the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or
not we speak. We .can sit in our corners mute forever while our
sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children ar.e
distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can s1t
in our safe corners mute as b ottles, and we will still be no less
afraid.
In my house this year we are celebrating t~e feast .of Kwanza,
the African~american festival of harvest whtch begms the d.ay
after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven pn.n~
ciples of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umo]a,
TRANSFORMATION OF SILENCE 43
which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain uni~
ty in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the sec~
ond day, was Kujich agulia – self~determination – the decision
to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, in~
stead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the
third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima- col~
lective work and responsibility – the decision to build and
maintain ourselves and our communities together and to
recognize and solve our problems together.
Each of us is here now because in one way or another we
share a commitment to language and to the power of language,
and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to
work against us. In the transform~tion of silence into language
and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish
or examine her function in that transformation and to
recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only
the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by
which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also
those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it
is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which
we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this
way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that
is creative and continuing, that is growth.
And it is never without fear – of visibility, of the harsh light
of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we
have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death.
And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been
born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life
long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It
is very good for establishing perspective.
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we
must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words
out, to read them and share them and examine them in their
pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries
of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so
often we accept as our own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach
Black women’s writing – their experience is so different from
44 SxsTER OuTSIDER
mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and
Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She’s a white woman and
what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian,
what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This
woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the
other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and
each other.
We can learn to work and speak when we are afr:ffd in the
same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired .
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own
needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence
for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence
will choke us.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an at,
tempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences
between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but
silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
12/8/12 The White Savior Industrial Complex -‐‑ Global -‐‑ The Atlantic
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complex/254843/
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The White Savior Industrial
Complex
By Teju Cole
If we are
going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
Left, Invisible Children’s Jason Russell. Right, a protest leader in Lagos, Nigeria /
Facebook, AP
A week and a half ago, I watched the Kony2012 video. Afterward, I wrote a brief seven-part response,
which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account:
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest
growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
12/8/12 The White Savior Industrial Complex -‐‑ Global -‐‑ The Atlantic
2/7www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2012/03/the-‐‑white-‐‑savior-‐‑industrial-‐‑complex/254843/
These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond
Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites;; I’m told they generated fierce arguments. As the
days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of the Atlantic and the
2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning,
founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the
evening.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of
sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by
enthusiasm.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including,
importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is
about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5
million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about
that.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects
a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is
deadly.
Teju Cole
@tejucole
FollowFollow
8 Mar 12 Reply Retweet Favorite
12/8/12 The White Savior Industrial Complex -‐‑ Global -‐‑ The Atlantic
3/7www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2012/03/the-‐‑white-‐‑savior-‐‑industrial-‐‑complex/254843/
MORE ON THE LORD’S
RESISTANCE ARMY
The Decline of
American
Nationalism:
Why We Love to
Hate Kony 2012
The Soft Bigotry
of Kony 2012
Kony 2012:
Solving War
Crimes With
Wristbands
New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to
tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.
These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back
from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were
disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me
to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who’d reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points,
described the language in which they were expressed as “resentment.”
This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas
Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives
accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it
tonally similar to Kristof’s approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven
tweets.
Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in
their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score
cheap points, much less to hurt anyone’s feelings. I
believed that a certain kind of language is too
infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist.
I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to
leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel
shouldn’t have a point.
But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech
and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a
chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining
to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the
“angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays --
who now have greater access to the centers of influence
that ever before -- are under pressure to be well-behaved
when talking about their struggles. There is an
expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must
be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe
words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases
when it would be more honest to say “racist”;; we agree
that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are
nowhere to be found;; homophobia is a problem but no
one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed
language is that when someone dares to point out
something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as
unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have
12/8/12 The White Savior Industrial Complex -‐‑ Global -‐‑ The Atlantic
4/7www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2012/03/the-‐‑white-‐‑savior-‐‑industrial-‐‑complex/254843/
Obama’s War on
the LRA
The Bizarre and
Horrifying Story
of the LRA
fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they
suffer;; the effect of this enforced civility is that those
voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
It’s only in the context of this neutered language that my
rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The
interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof
if he had heard of me. “Of course,” he said. She asked him
what he made of my criticisms. His answer was
considered and genial, but what he said worried me more
than an angry outburst would have:
There has been a real discomfort and backlash
among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in
particular in this case, but people more broadly,
about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and
about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me
though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not
intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.
Here are some of the “middle-class educated Africans” Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them
and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered
the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012;; Ugandan
scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a
thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children;; and Ethiopian-American
novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a
brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof
calls a “humanitarian disaster,” and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it:
militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the
propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts
over a wide and varied terrain.
I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist.
I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron
the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made
me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow
him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the
isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is
putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out
the need for the need.
But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior
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Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than “making a
difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being
helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.
I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am
every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American,
enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country
makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: my own privileges of class, gender, and
sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cell phone was likely manufactured by poorly treated
workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven
Congo. I don’t fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive
practices.
And I also write all this as a novelist and story-writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives.
When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blonde toddler a photo of
Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the
representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell’s little boy would
develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own.
How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy;; that their right to life is
not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, “A singer may
be innocent;; never the song.”
One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of
conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony
2012, 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.
Many have done it under the banner of “making a difference.” To state this obvious and well-attested
truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an “educated middle-class
African,” and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-
class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise,
do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)
In any case, Kristof and I are in profound agreement about one thing: there is much happening in
many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that
doesn’t mean I haven’t seen or experienced African poverty first-hand. I grew up in a land of military
coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” programs. The genuine
hurt of Africa is no fiction.
And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of
us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays
hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread
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problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and
order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such
problems are both intricate and intensely local.
How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I
believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for
the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and
continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I’ve seen
many) about how “we have to save them because they can’t save themselves” can’t change that fact.
Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier this
year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country’s streets to protest the government’s
decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the
country’s otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening is that they
were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the
world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for
days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the
movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the
streets. The movement did not “succeed” in conventional terms. But something important had
changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I
know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our
lives.
This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video
about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and -- since corruption is endemic -- no single
villain to topple. There is certainly no “bridge character,” Kristof’s euphemism for white saviors in
Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of
Nigeria’s protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year.
Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right;; they marched
peacefully;; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink;; Christians stood guard
while Muslims prayed and vice-versa;; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of
country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.
Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient
villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony’s
indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This
is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, healthcare, and education can be built. How do
we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are
engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?
If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign
policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on
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Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and
American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did
not see fit to support the Nigeria protests. (Though the State Department issued a supportive
statement -- “our view on that is that the Nigerian people have the right to peaceful protest, we want
to see them protest peacefully, and we’re also urging the Nigerian security services to respect the
right of popular protest and conduct themselves professionally in dealing with the strikes” -- it
reeked of boilerplate rhetoric and, unsurprisingly, nothing tangible came of it.) This was as expected;;
under the banner of “American interests,” the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood
of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling
losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in
Honduras in the past three years: an American-backed coup and American militarization of that
country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been
murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country’s once-hopeful movement for
democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid.
This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a
bearing on our notions of innocence and our right to “help.”
Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign
policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference”
trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a
useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a
valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate
in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to
send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently
make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are
going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni
government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world’s
deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny
constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not
least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants
in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and
oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?
All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube,
Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent;; never the song.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-
complex/254843/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.