Aid and White Supremacy

I had the good fortune to be raised in India, Kenya, and Egypt. Growing up as a girl and young woman far from the United States and the West gave me a unique perspective.

I grew up white in worlds where I stood out and was treated differently, because of my whiteness. I was also an American and a diplomat’s daughter, so sometimes it’s hard to discern exactly where my sense of untouchability came from.

I can tell you that soon after we moved to India when I was three years old, I felt untouchable because of my whiteness. I could command attention. I was allowed to do things and go places other children were not. I soon learned I was much less likely to get in trouble because of my whiteness. I knew my whiteness protected me and that it wasn’t fair.

When I became an aid worker, I absolved myself from examining whether I could be racist. I gave myself a free pass because I was a changemaker, and I thought that racism didn’t influence me. We think “I’m a good person, I can’t be racist,” but it’s a defense mechanism, constructed to protect our sense of self from discomfort.

I started to write about how aid can be racist (here and here) after living and working in post-conflict Liberia. In the decade since then, I’ve continued my journey. More recently, I wrote about white supremacy and how it affects me and my changemaking.

Here, I want to unpack what the humanitarian aid and international development industry have to do with racism. Maybe you’ll agree with me. Maybe you won’t. Either way, I welcome you to the conversation and I’m glad you’re here.

Before we get started, I need to share that I have written and rewritten this piece more than anything I’ve ever written in my life. I have worked harder on it and thought longer about it than any of the other writing I’ve shared here.

I kept feeling that what I had to say wasn’t good enough because when I started looking, I kept seeing my own biases and unconscious assumptions about what racism is and how it operates in the aid industry. I needed to learn a language to structure my experience.

I am both ashamed and embarrassed when I look back and see many instances of how I behaved as a young aid worker. I wish I could have a long conversation with my younger self about these topics. It would have done me and my work a world of good. It would have amplified my impact.

I am writing this as a personal exploration and an invitation into inquiry. If you are white and a changemaker, a humanitarian aid or an international development worker, or working in a non-profit, I wrote this for you.

I’ll map our journey along Layla F. Saad’s’s book ‘Me & White Supremacy’. Saad creates a scaffolding of language to talk about and explore racism and white supremacy.

Saad describes white supremacy as, "the historic and modern legislating, societal conditioning, and systemic institutionalizing of the construction of whiteness as inherently superior to people of other races."

“Whiteness” isn’t real per se, but we make it real. The construction of whiteness is a system of domination that we are all a part of, seeing as for centuries it has been baked into our societies, systems, and governments. It is all but invisible to many white people because we haven’t bothered to look.

In “Part 1, ‘The Basics’,” Saad explains and explores the concepts of white privilege, white fragility, tone policing, white silence, white superiority, and white exceptionalism. We’re going to do the same here, but with aid work.

I have come to see the origins of aid and development as based on white supremacy.

In “What Does It Mean to Be White?”, Robin DiAngelo writes that, “White supremacy does not refer to individual white people per se and their individual intentions, but to a political-economic social system of domination. This system is based on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group…I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority.”

I'm going to explore how aid and development can perpetuate systems embedded in racism and white supremacy.

Aid doesn’t need to be racist.

Over the almost two decades I was an aid worker, I began to see a promising shift. There were fewer white people and women were in leadership at more levels, in more organizations. I hope this article can be a small part of encouraging us to accelerate that change.

Aid and development has a huge whiteness problem. I know it's uncomfortable to acknowledge, but if we don't allow ourselves to see the system for what it is, we'll never able to improve it.

Before we dive in, I want to suggest that the issues we’ll explore here are ones that are our responsibility to change. Change always begins with changing your mind.

If you’re unhappy or uncomfortable with what our journey unearths, that’s okay. Humanity is capable of tremendous change. Our work on anti-racism can shift our relationships and our communities into the world we want to create for ourselves and our children.  

So, let’s explore…

Aid and White Privilege

For aid workers, white privilege means being able to walk into the office without showing ID because your whiteness is your ID. Wherever I went as a white aid worker, I experienced special treatment because I was white.

Walking around African cities, whenever I needed a place to rest with A/C, I had unquestioned access to hotel lobbies. No one would question my presence there.

As a teenager in Cairo, I used my white privilege to sneak me and my friends into hotel swimming pools meant only for guests. If we did get caught, we knew we could expect excellent treatment and the chance to apologize and explain.

White privilege is knowing that if I get stopped by the traffic police, I am not going to end up threatened or in jail.

We know the experience of whiteness in our bodies —what it feels like to get a free pass. With ease, I walk into any luxury hotel, fancy office building, or expensive shop without a second thought. No one will follow me, search me, call security, or threaten me.

I know it is a different experience for Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. We all know it.

Whiteness is a passport into these elite places and one of the ways the shitty system guards its doors. Even if you don't like it, as a white aid or development worker, I know you have benefitted personally from white privilege.

Do we really think that aid worker jobs can’t be done by people in their own countries? Let’s be real. No matter what you do, your job could be done this very moment by someone from the country you’re in. Someone who will always care more and understand the context and the needs better than you. Right?

You call yourself aid worker, but from another perspective you are an immigrant stealing someone’s job. The fact that a boss thought you were more qualified than a local person is white privilege.

Aid and White Fragility

When we first start looking at racism and our part in racist systems, it can be very threatening to white people’s self-image. Aid workers like to pride ourselves on being good people and changing the world where it’s needed most, and we feel upset that we are being mischaracterized and misunderstood.

No one likes to be confronted, but something unique happens when white people are confronted about the harm being done by our whiteness. We get fragile. What we need to do is center the feelings and experience of the person we harmed. But it’s far too easy to let our feelings and injured pride take over and throw a tantrum. This is white fragility.

White fragility is real, and it is dangerous because it centers white people's feelings over and above the real and material harm being done to Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color by racism. Instead of talking about the racism, suddenly we are talking about how white people feel hurt by talking about it.

I know that white fragility is real because I can feel it in my body whenever I am challenged about whiteness and race. I feel panicked, frozen, like I’ve been singled out, and am going to be punished. It’s shame.

Shame is the hardest emotion to allow ourselves to feel. In western culture, where so many of our stories are about being abandoned and cast out, shame and abandonment go hand in hand.

We are terrified of being abandoned for doing something wrong, and so we dig in and refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing and take responsibility.

White fragility is why it's crucial for white people to have conversations about racism and white supremacy with other white people. We need to experience and learn to care for our personal fragility in an environment where we won’t be shamed or abandoned for making a mistake.

We deserve the safety to do our anti-racism work authentically and deeply, because shifting this in ourselves is essential work.

Aid and Tone Policing

Truth is often hard to hear. If you've ever stopped listening to a Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color because they sounded "too angry" or “rude”, this is tone policing. It is a reaction influenced by white fragility. Tone policing is often very effective at shutting down conversations about racism.

If white people don't want to hear the message, we reject the messenger. If only she was “less confrontational,” or “less aggressive”, we pretend we might be able to listen better.

I call bullshit. Adults are perfectly capable of listening to someone who is upset. It is children who need to be spoken to softly in order to understand the message.

Demanding that someone adjust how they are communicating, for you to listen to them, is an act of control. When white aid workers tone police, we assert ourselves as the deciders of how things will be done. Trying to control someone else’s speech is dominance.

In aid work, effective changemakers are often dismissed because they don’t know how or don’t care to communicate in the language of the global aid and development bureaucracy.

Aid uses tone policing to create intellectual compliance. The organizations that align themselves with aid’s existing (white) power structures can advance, while the more innovative, adaptive, and emergent ones might not. It is not a fair system.

When we try to control who can speak and how, we only make it worse.

Aid and White Superiority

As an American girl growing up overseas, my family used to attend the U.S. Embassy's 4th of July parties every year. There were more American flags than I'd see for an entire year, fireworks, hot dogs, and lots of t-shirt and baseball cap patriotism. I barely remembered the United States, but I remember being influenced by the bravado and thinking, "America is the best."

Maybe it was a normal thing to think as an American girl at a U.S. Embassy 4th of July party. Certainly, everyone was thinking it, or at least supposed to think it. The "America" that was “the best” was a particular type of America, of course.

White superiority is thinking whiteness is somehow better, cleaner, more civilized, and preferable to everything else.

As Saad writes:

“The idea of whiteness being ‘of higher rank, quality, or importance’ begins before you are even consciously aware of it. And because you are unaware of it, it goes largely unchallenged and becomes an internal truth that is deeply held even though it was not intentionally chosen…The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you…And you likely work within industries that uphold white superiority through a lack of representation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color at leadership levels, through inclusion and diversity policies that are about optical allyship, and through HR policies (implicit and explicit) that tone police and marginalize employees who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way before.

Where white superiority came up for me as an aid worker is when other aid workers would talk negatively about the country they were working in. As if the privilege of being hosted by country and living a quality of life unattainable in our home countries was an actual hardship. It is such an ugly attitude of entitlement, snubbing your hosts for their poverty — a poverty caused by us and our systems of colonialism.

I no longer stand for that kind of talk among my friends. White superiority is something we can —  and we need to — do away with.

Aid and White Exceptionalism

If you read this far and are thinking, “This doesn’t sound like me,” congratulations on our shared white exceptionalism.

White exceptionalism is thinking that you are the one exception to the negative impacts of whiteness. That this stuff may apply to other people, but it doesn't apply to you. If you are "one of the good ones", if you give yourself a free pass because [insert you reason here], this is white exceptionalism.

Because of the systemic nature of racism, none of us are exempt. Every single one of us on the planet is affected, no exceptions. As white people, we cannot escape the impact of our whiteness.

This is good news because we are all in this together and what we see cannot be unseen. Raising our individual consciousness around anti-racism work matters.

As an aid worker, I know you care. I know you want to do work that matters.

White exceptionalism is realizing that yes, me too. I also do this. I am also a part of these old and oppressive systems. So I can also be part of the change.

When we have a safe enough space to do our anti-racism work, it is easier to hold the awareness that we have played a part in these oppressive systems. And to start to take the next steps to change them.

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I hope I've challenged you to think about how racism can impact aid work, international development and non-profit work.

I highly recommend you check out Layla F. Saad’s ‘Me & White Supremacy’ and the companion guided journal. The book gives you lots of safe space to explore these ideas for yourself, which is what this work is all about.

I know this may be unfamiliar territory for you and I'm grateful for your company as we travel together.

If you enjoyed this, I hope you’ll consider sharing it with others. Sharing is caring!

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Thanks for reading.