Whites in Shining Armor
Posted on September 1, 2010 at 5:49 am
Pick up your local newspaper after any disaster and you’re likely to encounter a story about someone from your area saving lives, a photo of a movie star or other well-known person flying in shoes or clothes, or stories of international search and rescue teams pulling people from the rubble. Rarely will you see stories about local people, charities, or the government helping in the rescue efforts. Yet the majority of people rescued after every disaster are saved by family members, neighbors, by-standers, and local disaster response teams.
Our news coverage is so focused on Whites in Shining Armor that my sister-in-law, who is well-educated, reads two newspapers each day, and is an avid NPR listener, was surprised to learn that locally run charities exist outside of the Western world. Why did this surprise her? Because she never hears news stories about local non-profits. Yet there are locally run nonprofits all over the world, even in Myanmar with it’s military junta. When Cyclone Nargis stuck Myanmar over 500 local charities and community based organizations contributed to the response efforts, but they received little if any news coverage.
Why don’t news outlets cover the work of local organizations more? Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times, provides some insight in his response to a question posed to him from the author of the blog Texas in Africa. The question was essentially why do “many of his columns about Africa seem to portray ‘black Africans as victims’ and ‘white foreigners as their saviors.’” Kristof admitted “That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there”. Why the focus on Whites in Shining Armor? Kristof says that having a foreign protagonist is the best way to capture the interest of his readers.
This is the same technique your local paper is using. If they were to print a story about an Asian charity doing work in their community somewhere in Asia the story would very likely not get many readers. But a story of a hometown boy or girl going to that exact same village to do charity work has a local spin and local interest. Thus the story line of Whites in Shining Armor is endlessly repeated.
Charitable advertising perpetuates this misperception as well. In order to get people to pick up the phone and give, charity advertisements show only the worst of the problem. They do not mention the work of any local organizations or the government as this would detract from the urgency of the message. The stereotype of Whites in Shining Armor is reinforced by the commercial’s main message – they are the only ones that can help.
Does your charity, social venture project, or news outlet perpetuate or break the Whites in Shining Armor stereotype?
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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough
Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving
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Articles linked to in this post:
A Numbers Game – Wanderlust
Support to local initiatives in the Nargis response: a fringe versus mainstream approach – Humanitarian Practice Network
the white man’s burden – Texas in Africa
Related Posts:
Does your website inform or misinform donors?
Do Charity Fundraising Activities Hurt the Very People They’re Trying to Help?
« Charity websites working to educate donors • There is no free lunch – even in aid »
I wonder also whether white, middle class, western liberals are also more trusting of charities run by other white, middle class, western liberals.
Western media doesn’t show women breastfeeding in Madagascar either but I think it’s a safe assumption that they do. There’s a deeper problem than the media at work, here, if a Westerner presumes that non-white, non-Western communities don’t organize to charitably help each other/themselves. There are some things you don’t have to see to know that they exist and to me, one of them is that some human beings in every society feel an impulse to organize charitable efforts on behalf of their communities. I’m not excusing the media’s responsibility to show the world as it is, not just the Whites in Shining Armor. But if the media has to teach so basic an understanding of what human beings do and how we are–regardless of location, class, color, creed–I just don’t think media’s the central problem, here.
Well said.
And then there is the corollary: all local charities have to be run by dark people. We see this in Africa often, where a non-”black” (who’s family may have been in Africa for generations) is not considered a “real African” when planning for press, conferences, awards, and even funding.
The web of local organizations and grassroots initiatives, still largely undocumented and unrecognized around the world, offers an opportunity for sustainable and large-scale responses to relief and development that even the most comprehensive and impactful white-in-shining-armour efforts may never be able to accomplish.
In the HIV sector, a Ugandan study for the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and AIDS at Harvard in 2007 revealed that the prevalence of community-level initiatives for children affected by HIV/AIDS was one per 1,300 people. A mapping exercise sponsored by UNICEF identified over 1,800 of these community-based organizations focused on orphans and vulnerable children in Malawi alone (Network of Organizations working with Vulnerable and Orphaned Children in Malawi, 2005). And according to a 2004 survey by the University of Kwazulu-Natal (Manji & Naidoo, 2005), there are at least 50,000 community-based organizations in the South African non-profit sector alone. Swilling & Russell (2002) further point out that small grassroots organizations constitute 53% of the non-profit sector in South Africa, which contradicts the dominant image that development services are mainly provided by formal and professionally run non-governmental organizations.
While these figures may vary elsewhere around the world, as well as in other sectors, WiserEarth.org has already registered over 110,000 local organizations and movements working on a wide variety of issues in 243 countries. They estimate that they may well be over 1,000,000 such local groups operating across the globe.
Thanks for this important post!
Hi,
Thanks for all the great blog posts. Really helpful and thought provoking resources.
Comhlámh, is a non-profit Irish organisation working with volunteers, development workers and all those interested in social justice in Ireland. We work with and train many volunteers before they go overseas and encourage them to question the prejudices and stereotypes that we have in the West about people in developing countries and the myth ‘white saviour’. Blogs like this are a great resource to provoke discussion and debate! Thanks very much!
Another resource we use is our online forum http://www.talkaboutdevelopment.org where global issues can be critically discussed. It would be great to get some different opinions and perspectives on the site! All welcome!
And to take a look at what we have to say about responsible volunteering, have a look at our website http://www.volunteeringoptions.org.
Everything seems to come down to race, and I have noticed, that while one group (or individual) will call foul play and racism, they somehow can be so focused on their own persecution that they miss that someone else is being persecuted, sometimes right along in the same sentence…Essentially, we all have problems, everyone is misunderstood or persecuted by somebody else/another group. Some groups have it worse than others.
I do not think Media is the main problem. I think the problem is, people lack tolerance for those who are different than themselves and they associate with others like themselves. A good portion of the wealth of the world is in white hands, so therefore you see in the media a lot of white people giving hand outs and helping (thus the white knight). I think it is because 1. They do and 2. It helps bring in more money. It should be noted that there are studies that different ethnicities give money differently. There are psychological differences (generalization) in how and why other ethnicities are philanthropic. Perhaps when world stops calling things “black” or “white” (or another color) and starts looking the world’s problems as humanity’s issues then the media will change. In Havard’s Roger Fisher’s win-win negotiations (a negotiation method which focuses on: separating the people from the problem and focus on interests, not positions), we must find common ground and focus on our similarities to work through our differences. It seems in this virtual world, where we can communicate with others across cultures…we could find a common ground to tackle the world’s problems and not care about either the color of those being helped and the color of those helping. I myself would not want to be featured in the media just because I was black or white.
[...] Whites in Shining Armor – when there are problems in the third world, whites in shining armor come to the rescue. Local charities and NGO's get no coverage [...]
[...] Whites in Shining Armor when there are problems in the third world, whites in shining armor come to the rescue. Local charities and NGO's get no coverage [...]
I’ve been living in Ghana, West Africa for 14 years and in my experience Ghanaians ‘give’ as part of their day to day lives in the form of supporting family members.
However it has been culturally engrained to expect Aid on a large scale to come from abroad. Every day in the news there are stories here about the millions that have been donated by the Japanese government or the British Development agency…. Nothing about Ghanaians organising or helping Ghanaians on a large scale, without the involvement of foreigners from the West.
Ghanaians don’t formally adopt children or donate to orphanages, but they will raise their brother’s or cousins’ children without blinking.
A Ghanaian who has a steady income routinely will be paying for his immediate family as well as school fees and other expenses for anywhere between one and 10 extended family members.
So I have to say that the majority of Aid is from the Great White West, however on a family level, Africans are far more giving than any Westerner I’ve met.
[...] leaves me optimistic. Most of “the bottom billion” are not waiting around for Whites in Shining Armor — they are fashioning their own swords and armor and wielding and wearing them. Would be [...]
I would love to see your response to this article in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05Plumpy-t.html?pagewanted=1&hp
Talk about whites in shining armor…
I’m well-educated, but I don’t read even one newspaper a day, nor am I an NPR listener. I’m not surprised that locally-based charities exist all over the world, and I’m frankly amazed that anyone would be surprised by that. I don’t know that it’s the media’s fault in any case. If people don’t know that African mothers love their children without reading it in the New York Times, then how is that the fault of the Times?
That said, I’m going to give my charitable donation to a reputable 503(c)(3) organization that I trust will partner with local charities, aren’t I? They’re the ones on the ground in these places I’ve never been and will likely never go to. My alternative to choosing a well-documented Western charity what will spend my donation wisely is to try to select (myself) from among thousands of local charities – where is my resource for doing that? They may have no way of contacting me in a language I understand. I’ll likely have no way to confirm their legitimacy or compare them to their peers. How much extra good can my money do after I try to choose from among them, even if I somehow manage to choose well?
Your complaint seems to be that media doesn’t give these local charities enough credit (Similarly, does my charity of choice give their local partners enough credit in their promotional materials?). If the media told more stories about local charitable efforts, to what changes would that lead?
After the Haiti earthquake, the media focus was exclusively on teams of firemen flown in from Europe, or the efforts of the large aid agencies. Our (ATD Fourth World) local team in Port-au-Prince was able to bear witness, from the first seconds after the earthquake, to the tremendous courage and strength of Haitians who, contrary to the media portrayal, did not wait for heavy machinery being flown in to save people, but dug, and continued to dig for weeks, using their own resourcefulness to find friends and relatives.
But within the NGO community, could more not be done to publicise efforts undertaken locally, by local people. Or is that not in the fundraisers’ best interests?
As an Urban Agriculture volunteer in Senegal working for the Peace Corps (the highly imperfect institution that it is), I have to say I was also pleasantly surprised to come face-to-face with so many small, local NGO’s doing grassroots work confined to specific cities or regions here. I am in an awkward position as one of the “whites in shining armor” in town (Kolda) because though I clearly have the means to drink beer at a wifi spot (as I am doing right now), I am not just another USAID worker (who we as volunteers tend to make fun of), arriving in a white SUV, speaking only French, and staying at the semi-luxurious hotel in town.
For all the complaints I have of the Peace Corps, I do feel we have a good model in that we are encouraged to collaborate with local charities and NGOs in the work that they are already (and often more intimately/capably) are doing. The less big money we can put into a project, the better. The less over-blown and ambitious our projects, the better. The more I can leave in the hands of local organizations, the more sustainable it can be. And yes, that may mean I don’t have any BIG schools or hospitals I can claim to have helped build, but it is better in the long run.
I feel on a personal level, I feel unspoken pressure from friends and family to have a “white in shining armor” story to take away from the Peace Corps, a sort of elevator pitch of how I built X number of wells, implemented X number of school gardens, and “revolutionized” farming practices. The anti-climactic, and often disappointing, thing about sustainable development work is that if it’s done well, you shouldn’t have your “white in shining armor” moment at all.
[...] A source cited in Algoso’s article, the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough, notes in Whites in Shining Armor that “having a foreign [i.e., American or other western] protagonist is the best way to [...]
[...] Whites in Shining Armour @Saundra_S on Good Intents (written earlier, but highly relevant) [...]
[...] critiques are here, and here. Kristof’s response to these critiques is [...]
[...] by giving credit where credit is due to a post from “good intentions are not enough.” the post and the blog are both worth [...]
[...] me, common-sense prevails: the Western media is of course Western-centric and will amplify the Whites in Shining Armor stereotype. They have no incentive to be otherwise. Americans remain largely ignorant about the [...]
[...] see three objections to the DIY article. One is the “White in Shining Armor” story, which needs a rest. As it turns out, I’ve spent some energy arguing that [...]