Whitewashing in the aid sector.

So I’m a development practitioner, I have worked in international aid and development for the better half of a decade. This industry is all I know. However, working within it as a 1^st generation Sri Lankan-Australian and thus a woman of colour has presented a unique challenge that I continue to work within even 11 years after I entered this space.

I’ve often had friends comment that the aid industry is one which seems to be over represented by Caucasian women of a certain socio-economic background, usually one which is slightly more well off. They have asked me why it is that I continue to operate in such a space and more critically why I persist in such a white washed domain. It took me a while to ponder on this to understand it all myself, what I came up with is that the reason I have stayed within this industry is because I believe in working towards poverty reduction and inclusivity, but also to challenge the predominant ‘white saviour complex’ approach to community and international development.

I see it as one of my core responsibilities to remind those around me that not all brown faces are in need of saving. That we existed years before the white man stumbled upon us; that we have and have always had inherent agency and capacity which existed prior to them, and that even if we were struggling, we still had dignity and self-autonomy outside of who we were to those who came along to ‘save us’.

I tell myself daily that I am here to  remind people that those who look like me are not to be consistently depicted as victims and placed in fundraising campaigns to simply elicit sob story related donations. We are not victims of our traditions or our cultures. Our religious beliefs, our ways of life are not to be illustrated as primitive or somehow lacking. The emphasis should not be placed on the rhetoric that all it took was a white man swooping in and saving us in order for the greater good to occur. That we don’t need that ‘altruistic’ white hand lifting us up out of the so called misery we were in before.

One of the biggest challenges we face within the international aid and development sector is how to depict people with dignity whilst still trying to fundraise for the projects and programs we fund. What needs to be remembered in this instance is that portraying all of our project participants with a skewed victim mentality is not the answer. It robs them of their inherent agency as human beings and looks over their pre-existing capabilities. The current superiority complex involved with traditional giving is something that needs to be radically changed.

For me, I do what I do in order to carve out a space for more diversified voices and experiences to come to the forefront within the sector. I see myself as acting as an accountability checkpoint asking the constant question of ‘are you portraying that person with the dignity they deserve and were born with?’ and ‘are you reinforcing the white saviour complex in which taming the “savages” is simply paramount’? My role as I see it is about raising people’s awareness towards not inadvertently whitewashing cultures and simplifying complex poverty scenarios down to ‘that poor brown person, from that poor, corrupt 3^rd world country that needs us to save them’.

In this instance we must all do better at attempting to ensure that aid and development doesn’t continue to be delivered as a neo-colonialist function in which the souls of the savages are being saved. We need to do better to not blame development challenges on ‘primitive’ practices of those who sit outside of things that we understand in the so called ‘1^st world’.

Thus are the challenges of a brown development practitioner in a whitewashed aid industry dripping with a dated superiority complex.

Sx