Self-serving altruism and the white saviour complex
Nadja Wipp
When volunteering is concerned, there are the same pictures plastered all over the Internet. Most of the time, these pictures are of a white person surrounded by children of colour or people from the Global South. The caption accompanying the picture is always about how much volunteering taught them, as well as how blessed and thankful they are for the experience. The praise volunteers receive for the weeks, or months, of being “selfless” and “world changers” can be overwhelming. I am sure you’ve seen these pictures at least a couple of times while browsing Instagram.
When I ask people to deconstruct this performative aspect of volunteering and question if such behaviour is ethical, I often receive similar responses:
“They have a good heart.”
“They have really good intentions.”
“They just want to help.”
But what if I told you that volunteering often promotes white supremacy, feeds into the White Saviour Complex and could do more harm than good? Would you be willing to scrutinise this system?
What if these ‘good intentions’ benefit the volunteers more than the projects and people they are serving? Many volunteers, mostly from Western countries, travel to the Global South for a short amount of time and pay plenty of money to participate. In case you were not aware, volunteering organisations generate millions of pounds in revenue because of the volunteers who sign up.
Original caption: Capt. Michael Silva, 404th Civil Affairs Battalion dentist, entertains a group of children at Chebelley Village, Djibouti, May 21, 2015. Silva was one of several volunteers from Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa who helped deliver more than 40 donated soccer balls from the “Kick for Nick” charity to the village. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Nathan Maysonet)
While humanitarian aid and international development are highly complex fields, particularly because the aim is to find sustainable solutions, most volunteering programs are short-term mechanisms involving volunteers that come with almost no significant skill sets. Volunteer projects in the Global South are often focused on work with children, enabling the volunteers to teach in local schools. How is it ethical for people from the Global North to teach in elementary schools by themselves without any kind of educational background, whereas in their home country it would be unethical since they do not possess a teaching degree? Furthermore, receiving a teacher’s degree involves studying subjects such as children psychology and pedagogy, which are crucial for teaching and working with children. Volunteers do not have this knowledge and understanding when taking the sole responsibility of a classroom. Therefore, volunteers should, at maximum, occupy the role of an assistant.
It is not solely the aspect of qualifications, or lack thereof, that is problematic. It is also the short amount of time volunteers actually spend volunteering. Sustainable development requires an orientation towards long-term solutions as well as for people to be involved for a long period of time. While many may believe that working with vulnerable children, such as in orphanages, is benefiting the kids, they are actually completely disregarding the fact that children end up getting used to their presence. Suddenly leaving after a short amount of time, replaced by a new batch of volunteers, can have adverse effects on children’s well-being and psychological development, causing issues such as abandonment anxiety and the ability to build healthy relationships.
The Harvard Business School published a working paper titled: “Self-Serving Altruism? When unethical actions that benefit others do not trigger guilt?”. Research has found that people are morally flexible when justifying self centred behaviour, especially when such behaviour is serving others as well as them. Furthermore, “prior research has found that concern for the outcome and well-being of others can lead people to behave unethically when they feel empathy toward the beneficiaries.”
Applying this research unto the field of volunteering, I highly believe that many correlations can be found. The unethical tasks that many volunteers are allowed to undertake without any kind of qualifications seem to be justified through their selfless good intentions to help people, and therefore, barely trigger any guilt.
Original caption: American missionary couple with residents of Bafodia, Sierra Leone (West Africa) | This photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
But many actions of volunteers are doing communities more harm than good. Noelle Sullivan is a member of the Northwestern University faculty in Global Health Studies who documented her experiences with volunteers in Tanzania. The Volunteer Tourism project she encountered in Tanzania was focusing on medical volunteering, promoting itself as a great opportunity to boost the participant’s CVs without any kind of medial experience or language proficiency. She reports how young adolescents, mostly from the Global North, delivered babies without supervision in addition to providing vaccines and other medical procedures for which volunteers were not qualified to do. She describes a particular female volunteer who violated medical best practice in an unsupervised birth assistance with an invasive procedure. This procedure could have left the mother and child with severe medical consequences such as suffocation. Volunteering without expertise can put people at risk as well as undermining local health systems.
Volunteering has become a political economy in which Western cultural values of charity laid the foundation for the mobilisation of people from the Global North to volunteer within the Global South. The volunteers only need two simple qualifications: they have paid to be there, and of course, they “have good intentions”. Volunteering has become volunteer tourism - often completed during people’s vacation or gap-years.
The social media landscape has also provided a platform for people to perform, to depict volunteer work as heroic, and to construct an image of selflessness. Within this narrative framework, the volunteer’s identity while traveling becomes a ‘pure’ self - a Saviour. Does this phenomenon not echo similar ideologies of colonialism, imperialism, and the project to ‘civilise’? Once again, the Global North has seemingly put the Global South into a position of dependency. The Global South has become a space in which White Saviours travel to achieve a sense of moral fulfilment and to collect photographic evidence of their good intentions.
Simply put: this is a system of good disguised as white supremacy. The fact that so many Western endeavour in the form of volunteer tourism feed into the narrative of Western superiority is often not critically questioned. Western volunteers offering their valuable time and financial resources to help in the Global South with no skill-set or qualifications while posting selfies with vulnerable people is only the tip of the iceberg. As explored by scholar Bandyopadhyay, this “narrative results in a colonisation of the mind, wherein whiteness is associated with progress, power and domination.”
The narrative of volunteer tourism is quite often the same: the Western person is the hero of the story, receiving praise from their chosen audience for the good person that they are. It is about time we start critically questioning why volunteer tourism is a socially accepted norm. The fact that many Western volunteers are allowed to engage in tasks they would not be qualified enough for to do in their own country, but are allowed to do so in the Global South, is an indication of superiority on the basis of race and heritage. A race and heritage that stands above rules and regulations. It is white supremacy laid out in the most ‘innocent’ way.
The jfa team highly encourages readers to explore the platform No White Saviours at https://nowhitesaviors.org.