Memoirs of a White Savior

Last year, a student came to my office hours to discuss her post-graduation plans. She said she wanted to travel, teach, and write.  “How about joining the Peace Corps?” I suggested. She grimaced. “The Peace Corps is problematic,” she said.  I replied the way I always do when a student uses that all-purpose put-down. “What’s the problem?” I asked.  “I don’t want to be a white savior,” she explained. “That’s pretty much the worst thing you can be.” Indeed it is. The term “white savior” became commonplace in 2012, when the Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole issued a series of tweets — later expanded into an article in The Atlantic — denouncing American do-gooder campaigns overseas, especially in Africa. His immediate target was the “KONY 2012” video of that year, a slickly produced film — by a white moviemaker — demanding the arrest of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But Cole’s larger goal was to indict the entire “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” as he called it, which allowed Westerners to imagine themselves as heroic protectors of defenseless Africans. Conveniently, Cole added, it also let them ignore the deep structural and historical inequities that had enriched the West at the expense of everybody else. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” Instead of assuming that they know what is best, he urged, Americans should ask other people what they want. And instead of engaging in feel-good volunteer projects that do not do any actual good, we should challenge “a system built on pillage” and “the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy.”          The Peace Corps is a volunteer agency as well as an agent of foreign policy. So it has also become a frequent punching bag on several popular Instagram accounts that have echoed — and amplified — Cole’s critique. No White Saviors (906,000 followers) denounces the Peace Corps as “imperialism in action”; at the parody account Barbie Savior (154,000 followers), you can thrill to the pseudo-adventures of a Peace-Corps-like doll who takes selfies with orphans, squats over a pit latrine, and invokes famous humanitarians. (“If you put an inspirational quote under your selfie, no one can see your narcissism — M. Gandhi.”) Never mind that Cole’s original posts mocked digital activism such as the KONY 2012 video, which featured “fresh-faced Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world,” as he observed. In the Age of the iPhone, apparently, the only answer to a misguided social-media campaign is another social-media campaign.          And now the campaign has spread into the Peace Corps itself, as my student noted. She alerted me to Decolonizing Peace Corps (9300 followers), which was started by three returned volunteers from Mozambique after the agency evacuated them — and the other 7300 volunteers around the world — amid the COVID pandemic in March 2020. Later that spring, following the police murder of George Floyd, the Mozambique trio circulated a petition urging the Peace Corps to reckon with its allegedly racist and colonialist roots. They sent it to No White Saviors, who told them a petition “wasn’t going to be enough”; what the volunteers needed was, yes, their own Instagram account. Decolonizing Peace Corps went live shortly after. Inspired by campaigns to abolish the police, it demanded the abolition of the Peace Corps. “When you look at the Peace Corps and you look at the police and you see the origins, you ask yourself, can this really be reformed?” one of the account’s founders asked. “How can you reform a system that was founded on neocolonialism and imperialism by a country built on genocide and slavery?” The question answers itself.          Meanwhile, as the pandemic continued to surge, No White Saviors stepped up its own attacks on the Peace Corps. Now that all the volunteers had come home, it wrote, the agency should permanently close up shop. “No more pretending inexperienced young people are actually useful in countries and cultures they are alien to,” No White Saviors wrote in 2021. “Instead you could pay skilled local volunteers to work more effectively. No more spending money on flights

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