Are we really helping?
This picture was taken at the Student Union Building (the Nest) at the University of British Columbia on March 29th. This image depicts the booth of UNICEF UBC during the book drive initiative that was held that week. When thinking about this assignment and doing the readings UNICEF was constantly on the back of my mind and I want to reflect on it, as an executive member of the club. As a club our main goal is to raise money for UNICEF Canada and our initiate this year was to “help children in underdeveloped countries get the right to education”.
Resembling the NGOs Katie MacDonald mentions in the introduction to her article “Calls of Educating Girls in the Third World: Futurity, Girls and the ‘Third World Woman’” the discourses UNICEF uses to get donations are remarkably similar. Children are depicted as innocent and vulnerable, while their nationalities and cultures are clumped together and referred to as “underdeveloped”. Looking at all the merchandise we receive from UNICEF Canada, including the banner present in this photograph, we can see how this discourses gain shape as images and how this materialization of ideas brings about another issue. The UNICEF banner featuring a young girl of color perpetuates the victimization of people from other cultures, and the appropriation of women’s body. Her image is there for the purpose of compelling people to donate to the cause, and in this way that girls image, her body, has become a commodity. Not only that but she isn’t portrayed in precarious conditions from which she would need saving from, but rather she is dresses up and nice depicting what her life could be like after “your donation”. This really shows Macdonald’s analysis of how Westerners see themselves as a source of empowerment for young women and how these women represent a certain hope for the future.
Although it was not part of the readings for this class I would like to draw on some of Katherine M. Bell’s arguments in her essay “Raising Africa?: Celebrity and the Rhetoric of the White Saviour”. Bell’s essay focuses on how the celebrity philanthropist is constructed as redeemer of distant Others and how this philanthropic role creates the White Saviour, a powerful brand of contemporary cultural authority (Bell, 2013, p.1). While she focuses on Africa and how particular celebrities such as Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie use their discursive power to infuse their public personae within the colonial legacy and post-colonial machinations that have left a mark on the continent, her overarching analysis is relevant to Macdonald’s reflection on the construction of the Third World girl as an emblem of a particular kind of futurity and the constant portrayal of the West as helper and as a source for empowerment. Part of Macdonald’s analysis includes the privatization of international development and how it responsibilizes individuals to alleviate global inequalities. Development, through a neoliberal lens, focuses on the individual (the one donating) which places them as a cultural authority. This in turn recenters whiteness and obscures the racialized power dynamics at play (Bell, 2013, p.5). The mentality of linear progress found in mainstream international development erases the ongoing legacy of colonialism and asserts that structural inequalities of race are largely in the past, hence placing the Wester donor as a “solution” or “cure” without positioning him/her as part of the problem which needs fixing. Similarly when clubs on our campus such as UNICEF UBC, or RedCross receive donations from students, those students have a cultural authority and privileges that don’t become part of the discourse. Rarely do we as students and citizens think that we might be part of or support systems of oppression and colonial rule that are causing the issues we attempt to solve through donations.
Bell, Katherine M. (2013). Raising Africa?: Celebrity and the Rhetoric of the White Saviour. California State University, East Bay. https://www.learning-analytics.info/journals/index.php/portal/article/viewFile/3185/3399
Macdonald, Katie (2015). Calls of Educating Girls in the Third World: Futurity, Girls and the ‘Third World Woman. A Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 23 (1), pgs. 1-17 http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/doi/ref/10.1080/0966369X.2014.991699?scroll=top