Neocolonial Twilight: “White People Won’t Save You”

There’s a video produced by some random leftist which compiles a constant half-hour stream of cringe-inducing Hollywood White Savior footage. Over and over and over again, you’re force-fed scene after scene of contrived imprinting on Whites of the romantic notion that our highest calling and purpose is saving brown people. You may recognize some of the films, from the ultimate classic, Lawrence of Arabia, up through the latest Emmy-nominated films about White people prancing around the world solving everybody else’s problems.

https://vimeo.com/288648921

The final denouement of colonialism always involves the colonial class pleading that they’re there to help. In the micro, you have the elderly White farmer in 2010’s Mugabe and the White African insisting that he’s a kind and colorblind old man just trying to feed the nation. In the macro, you have the White Savior phenomenon. It transcends left and right, with neoconservative David French at National Review calling on his fellow evangelicals to take up the White Man’s Burden in the name of Christ and neoliberal Barack Obama calling on us to do it in the name of “social justice.”

Whether you’re solving brown people problems that they’re too pathetic to resolve themselves for Christ, for “social justice,” or for the Facebook profile of yourself swaddling AIDS orphans while on summer break, you’re liable to find yourself criticized by both liberal and conservative Millennials who find your behavior grating for the same reason, …expressed from opposite angles. The emerging left’s angle, that minorities should stop being depicted as selfless subhuman inferiors is permitted in popular discourse while the emerging right’s angle remains subject to censorship.

For the emerging right, young White men and women are asking themselves why they’re being constantly called to help and support all these rather obnoxious and hostile strangers. Since neolibs and neocons still control public discourse, it’s one of those questions that can’t be raised, bordering on legally actionable hate speech. But they can’t stop the emerging left from speaking out when the voices are those precious voices of color which their neoliberal rules don’t permit them to silence. They can’t stop minorities from insisting that they’re fully human, regard themselves as our equals, and aren’t looking to serve as props for our neurotic games to prove to one another how enlightened we are.

These minorities who reject Boomer neoliberalism in favor of heartfelt tribalism are moving in the smart direction. White people won’t save them. White Americans can’t even save themselves, and our “helpful” interactions with minorities virtually always involve an ulterior motive. After all, couldn’t David French have fed and cared for an entire village of Ethiopians for the effort and expense it took him to smuggle one into America to rely upon in article after article as a moral prop confirming his evangelical bonafides?

All of Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street have been trying for generations to force White and Black Americans to bond with one another. For most Whites and Blacks, even at their best interracial relations still boil down to trying to make the best of dealing with an alien and untrusted tribal other. Even when adopted as infants, Blacks raised in White families generally maintain an otherness and sense of displacement and alienation. David’s daughter is old enough to be asking questions about Ethiopia, about the faraway kingdom which belongs to “her people,” who aren’t her parents’ people.

While a minority subset of Hispanic immigrants and light-skinned Arab Christians can assimilate in small numbers, our racial differences have functioned as proxies for ethnic and national distinction in America for for over 500 years. A No Fault Divorce is what the youngest Americans are looking toward, …a way to end the violent, destructive, and senseless mess that’s been America’s failed experiment at everybody overcoming profound congenital differences.

Even if you agree with your fellow right-thinking neolib and neocon associates that Whiteness and Blackness are both problems to be solved by Americanness, consumerism, and secular therapy culture, you can’t solve the problem that races exist, are different, and generally prefer to live, work, and play among their own. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that all really is just ignorant prejudice and fear driving it instead of real expressions of diversity bubbling up from the blood. Are we going to solve the fact that we humans are ignorant and fearful any time soon? Is that the plan? We’ve wasted half of a millennium on this bloody, nasty attempt to get along side-by-side, yet we’re promised we’re only a few hundred more years away from getting through the bad part so we can get to a future where there are no racial differences because everybody’s thoroughly interbred.

India’s been going with that exact strategy for several thousand years, with no sign of achieving a colorblind society in sight. White people won’t save minorities. Non-whites won’t finally all decide to start thinking and acting the way we tend to think they should. I’m hopeful that the emerging political voices will continue this trend we’re seeing, where Black youths mock White Saviorism as condescending racist bullshit and White youths stop feeling obligated to serve some other group in order to feel good about themselves and their own group. Let’s all just call it even and let the various nations in this prolapsed empire save themselves.