April 2, 2015 - 21:39
Check out both Teju Cole’s well-known essay, The White Savior Industrial Complex, which challenges the impulse of well-intentioned Americans to do good in the world, particularly in Africa. Cole observes that “a good heart…does not always allow us to think constellationally … to connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind isolated ‘disasters’ … we see no need to reason out the need for the need.” More recently, Indigenous Action Media published another essay with a similar title and a similar message: Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, which challenges the commodification and exploitation of allyship in the “activism industry,” calls such support and solidarity “criminal,” a means of perpetuating colonialism--and offers the alternative of being an accomplice, “a person who helps another commit a crime,” becoming complicit in a struggle towards liberation....