For almost eight years now, I’ve been writing about how the “trick” of helping is that it is actually about you. How we “show up” for and with other people – in our partnerships and in our practices – starts with how we first show up for ourselves, with our whole selves, and then must translate into collective action.
The fact that it’s been exposed that an aid system led by good ol’ boys “show up” in countries buying prostitute’s time and sexually assaulting and harassing women, and that this has been going unchecked for decades, is so, so painful.
The humanitarian sector has long been as escape for people from rich countries running away from themselves. It is not surprising that people so separated from their own goodness/souls could abuse and neglect the power of their positions in a humanitarian context.
I pray for these often hard-living, often hard-drinking cowboys, or any person so separated from another person’s dignity in their role as humanitarians. I really do. I pray and work for the day when the leaders of organizations that hire them and the enablers that pass them around finally find the gumption to say, “no more.”
I can’t say it enough. #AidToo is rooted in and perpetuated by interpersonal, gendered, historical, economic, and geopolitical power imbalances, discussions of which we seem to avoid like the plague in our sector. That has to change.
Media coverage in rich countries of the Oxfam scandal have been remiss, irresponsible, even negligent in featuring or including commentary and perspectives of people from Haiti and women of color in this debate.* That has to change.
The mythology of the altruistic, globe-trotting expat aid worker being above reproach and the reactionary response justifying the “do-gooder” impulse is irresponsible and misguided. That has to change.
I’ll say it a million times if I have to: Under the shadow of “doing good,” much is hidden – our misogyny, our racism, our exploitation and extraction, our history, our willful ignorance, our current reality.
I don’t know, frankly, if the aid sector can be redeemed. What I do know is that from it, there is much to heal.
Give advice; if people don’t listen, let adversity teach them.
~Ethiopian proverb
*Exceptions I’ve noted are in the included links in that paragraph, as well as the first two related posts below.
Related Posts
- What now? Beyond the #OxfamScandal
- When the fox guards the hen house
- Does aid need a 12-step program?
- Women, we don’t always have to rush to “fixing”
- It’s the end of foreign aid as we know it, and I feel fine
- Getting real about dominant white culture
- Subjective, squishy, touchy, feely, and fundamental: Partnership matters
- “Grassroots means no brains’: How to tackle racism in the aid sector” by Rashida Petersen & Jennifer Lentfer, The Guardian UK, 4 August 2017.
- White supremacy, black liberation, and global development: The conversations we’re not having
- “Wrestling with my white fragility” by Jennifer Lentfer, OpenDemocracy Transformation, 15 December 2016.
