Tag Archives: Racism

Our Western Identity

The Proportionality of Our Attention

4 Comments

Depending on how you look at it, it was Day 4 or Year 8 of the war in Ukraine when I began drafting this blog.  It is now Day 145. I recall those early days, the emotions stirred as I saw my younger self in the wire-rimmed glasses and quilted winter coat of a young Kyiv professional, or my family in the hand of a child clutching his mother’s luggage strap as the throng surged for the door of a train. There was little in my head that could be labelled dispassionate. In other words, my head held little professional interest in the Ukraine news, even as my unease grew at the white-out erasing all line of sight to any other crisis.

It is OK to identify with people because we find something of ourselves in them.  These paths of affinity trace paths of identity such as race and gender as well as less obvious similarities.  In March 2002, in the back of an MSF Landcruiser, I sat opposite an Angolan man who had already lost four children, cradling a last, limp daughter on his lap. My next several nights brought terrible imagery, and in the mornings came panic attacks at the thought of going to work.  Weeks later, debriefing with a psycho-social care counsellor in Amsterdam, I came to understand why I’d experienced such a reaction on this occasion, and not on others.  I’d become a father in 1999 and was struggling with a new kind of performance anxiety. This man and his little girl were no longer ‘simply’ a pair of humans in extreme distress.  I saw a dad, unable to protect his child, and to this day it seems like the most terrifying feeling in the world. 

It is even OK for the countries of Europe to devote far more attention and aid to the crisis in their back yard, just as we would expect the African Union to be far more involved in a crisis in the Sahel than the OAS or ASEAN nations.  But…

It is not OK to ignore the structure of the aid system to the point that our affinities undermine our common humanity; to ignore the significantly skewed concentration of ‘certain’ affinities in the decision-making clubhouses across major donors, UN agencies, and the large INGOs. Voting on the Christmas dinner menu is not a problem until we in the clubhouses ‘discover’ that turkeys own the bulk of the votes. Neither human affinities nor the AU nor the OAS create a global distortion in aid resources.  The formal humanitarian sector does. Notably, in 2022 this distortion has been noted. Witness the mainstream critique being raised re the proportionality of aid going to the Ukraine versus other crises, such as Somalia, Yemen, or Ethiopia. (see here or here).  And yet our fixation on Ukraine has endured these past months, only beginning to wane in June and only fleetingly interrupted by an earthquake in Afghanistan.

Bias in the ignoring of bias.  Following the previous point, perhaps more revealing and yet less revealed is the double-standard; the non-response to partiality’s contamination of the principled ‘purity’ of aid.  For years now, ‘local’ actors have been forced to swallow the bitter pill that they cannot be neutral because of their local identity, and hence were disqualified from ascending to the penthouse suites in the global humanitarian club. Their ‘natural’ bias of being in their home context, full of affinities, has been judged as threat to principled aid. The system assigns consequences to such bias. So where was the call in the Ukraine crisis for humanitarian decision-makers to step aside given their bias; given their conflicted interest and powerful affinities?  Where was the challenge to the neutrality of their agencies and the appropriateness of having authority over their work given the undivided support for Ukraine among their home country governments and citizens?

Humanitarians need to be particularly mindful of impartiality in this regard, because this is the substantive ethical principle that operationalizes our affinity-laced humanity.  Impartiality instructs humanitarian aid be delivered on a non-discriminatory basis and therefore in proportion to the urgency of need.  We may forgive media corporations for following the cash and clicks even as we might hope for a more equitable distribution of news content.  If it bleeds, it leads – that is their credo?[1] But it is a problem for humanitarians when not all bleeding is of equal media value because humanitarians have a different obligation. Where is the assessment of the sector’s principled performance? As the Ukraine crisis produced and engulfed resources, how did impartiality fare at the global level of distribution?  Where is the concern over agencies pulling staff/resources away from other crises to manage the well-funded expansion of operations in the Ukraine war context? Tellingly, the Ukraine response suggests a pathogen in the system at the level of impartiality, which as an ethical rather than operational principle should raise far greater discussion than the neutrality of local organizations. 

Is institutional attention a critical resource, like healthcare, food, or cash? What does it mean when GD (General Director) after GD heads to Ukraine for a photo op and website home pages greet the visitor with the faces of Ukrainian children in March, April, May, and often still in June? Given the causal linkage of attention to the provision of assistance, asylum, refuge, and compassion, shouldn’t impartiality guide the institutional use of humanitarian media resources, such as an agency’s home pages or its Twitter feed? Perhaps this would have been the perfect time to counter the prominent bias in media attention by devoting prime website real estate to other crises, or sending GDs to other contexts, to interrupt the frozen gaze on Ukraine. To some extent this discussion is taking place. Good. But is the issue being framed as a matter of obligation and principle? Is this discussion alive in board rooms as an issue of accountability? Or are some humanitarians simply feeling uncomfortable with their in-house disproportions?

Privilege is the power of an agency to assume it can determine right from wrong for itself, especially in a system so weak in accountability. The entitlement of the formal Western sector is well illustrated in deciding for itself when it must play by its own rules, when compromising them is ok for itself or not OK for others.

Power is the privilege of not even being conscious of this assumption.

[1] Actually, when you think figuratively about it, If it bleeds, it leads wouldn’t be such a bad standard to guide impartiality.  Certain better than If they’re white, the aid shall take flight.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Time for a Punch in the Face?

4 Comments

Can the leopard change its spots?

Across the humanitarian sector, a surfacing of anger, denial, repent, frustration, recognition, shame, rationalization and hope. The sector moves into action: webinars, all-staff meetings, executive suite statement, and ‘This time!’ promises of a new zero tolerance.  This is not 2020, but 2018.  Did culture or power shift?  Hard to say.  How did our sector perform such a deep dive into abuse of power and not seize upon the issue of race? That remains a riddle to be unpacked.

As it now stands, the aid sector is again being frogmarched into a confrontation with what it has always exercised the privilege to ignore. And we should ask: This time, will the sector’s anti-racist protests  or the mea culpa declarations prove the spark to escape its inequitable relationship with people?

It is difficult to bet on success. The humanitarian sector has established a relatively unblemished track record of escaping from the challenge of transformation, leaving change agendas chopped down to technocratic reform.  The practice of reform – a seeming good – hence becomes a practiced evasion, an avoidance of addressing deeply embedded inequalities that coalesce in a cluster of ugly isms – paternalism, sexism, colonialism, elitism, and racism.  That incomplete list constitutes a straightforward humanitarian defect, namely that the sector is not humanitarian.  We may provide vital relief (as might a NATO or even a McDonald’s food distribution) but we trample at existential peril our distinct purpose as enshrined in the principle of humanity.

The difficulty of achieving transformation from within should not surprise us as much as our faith that we will succeed.  It is not simply that the sector relegates big fat disturbing truths to the bottom of the to-do list (too busy saving lives).  It is also the very humanitarian way in which we address symptoms without unearthing the causes.  Example: As the discussion on racism unfolds, Paul Currion explains that terminology like ‘localisation’ looks “suspiciously like language used to avoid talking about the lingering effects of racism.” In effect, localization, the sector’s ‘solution’ to the problem of its resources and power already being localized (i.e., in the West), employs terminology that functions as a terminus, as a building block of the selfsame problem.

So, will COVID-19 and the climate emergency combine to make this moment a critical juncture? Perhaps. Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine claims that “only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change.”  Or perhaps it is clearer in the less academic analysis of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Will the public outing of the humanitarian system’s institutional racism or its blind fragility amount to a punch in the mouth?  Will somebody “take a sledgehammer” to the entire system, as was suggested in a last month’s must-watch panel discussion hosted by The New Humanitarian? 

A call for disruption

To answer this question, let’s turn it around: what does this sledgehammer look like?  What does humanitarian disruption look like? And can a system disrupt itself from the inside? Can it punch itself in the mouth? In the TNH discussion, the panel explored how the perception of the US as a fragile state might be just such a driver or change. Kenyan cartoonist and political commentator Patrick Gathara asked, for example, if we can imagine African peacekeepers deployed to the United States. 

That question holds the potential to disrupt the dominant narrative, because it asks us to confront the underlying paradigm. To answer, humanitarians must imagine South-to-North humanitarian programming (see my examples, p. 26ff).  This leads to struggle, because we must reconcile our assumed legitimacy of North-to-South humanitarian action with South-to-North humanitarian work, which strikes us intuitively as wrong, or even nonsensical.  Should we not build, for example, a training scenario exercise where Cuban medical teams respond the opioid addiction crisis that killed almost 47,000 Americans in 2018 (compare to last year’s death toll of 11,215 fighters and civilians in the Syrian war)?

In previous analysis of how the humanitarian sector responded to the crisis of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I concluded that the intervention exemplified a more equitable and limited model of humanitarian action. The difference in how humanitarians conceived of their role in New Orleans versus in ‘humanitarian contexts’ surfaced the bias in the sectoral lens, and we can now recognize this bias as heavily embedded in racialized verdicts on the neediness, competence and agency of some people.

Humanitarian and disaster relief teams descended on the stricken city of New Orleans and delivered stuff – water, food, blankets, shelter. In other words, a decidedly punctual, modest response aiming to meet basic needs via the delivery of emergency relief. Contrary to the way it intervenes in the ‘global South’, the humanitarian intervention did not conceptualise the crisis in larger terms, and did not see the need (or feel the paternalistic urge?) to engage in rights-based political and social engineering with the goal of ‘fixing’ New Orleans. As a result, it did not seek to address long-standing structural vulnerabilities and problems of violence, corrupt governance, substance abuse, racial segregation and discrimination, gender oppression and violence, shockingly poor education and health services and the myriad of other needs the humanitarian system has captured within the scope of the ‘humanitarian crisis’. (DuBois 2018; 6, citations omitted).

The Katrina response hence demonstrated crisis intervention without further ‘humanitarianisation’. In contrast, crisis in the ‘global south’ produces short-term and assistentialist approaches that “are normalized to compensate for the persistence of structural problems related to rule of law, democratic accountability, public services and deep-seated social division.”[1]  Sounds like a key brick in the wall of humanitarian expansion.

The point is that challenges to the assumptions of North-to-South humanitarian action can be illuminating. However, the risk is that we do not probe deep enough.  One surprising moment in the aforementioned TNH webinar came as a number of panellists agreed on the worrying signs of instability in the US – threats of violent military repression of democratic protest, an uncontrolled virus that devastates ethnic minorities and the poor, divisive and corrupt politics, economic ruin of millions of Americans while a stock market sets records, etc.  That discussion included a proposition: “Should we consider the situation in the US a humanitarian crisis?” The audience answered in the affirmative, 45% saying yes versus 20% for no.

Is American really Yemen (or CAR, Sudan…) in disguise? This question, provocative and as emotionally satisfying as it may be, seems like the wrong question. The issue is not that the sector needs to treat the US more like the ‘dark continent’, it’s that it needs to treat the ‘dark continent’ more like it treats the US.  We should reject the idea that the US today is a ‘shithole’ in the way that resembles the ‘shithole’ countries that we have self-referentially defined as humanitarian contexts. We should learn to see that these so-called humanitarian contexts actually resemble countries in the West, full of contradictions and corruption, achievement and incompetence, massive advantages and terrible needs; and full of people whose dignity (a) rejects the assumption of needing to be saved and (b) demands the right to own their struggles.

The TNH poll thus invites the ‘white gaze’, where the deviation from a presumed White/Western norm of wealth and stability generates an exceptionalist break from history and politics, and yields the virtuous hierarchy of giver/savior above the helpless, incompetent victim.  Arianne Shahvisi captures this racially biased gaze in her concept of ‘tropicality’, and David Chandler has described this as a perception of non-Western countries as “incapable of rational policy-development and prone to corruption and nepotism,” peopled with victims in need of Western intervention against their “corrupt and inefficient elites.” 

To disrupt humanitarian power is to remove the legacy of racism from the justification and extensiveness of our interventions in places like South Sudan, Bangladesh, Haiti, or CAR.  It is to subvert the privilege of believing that our good intentions magically overcome our causal relationship to the profound injustices of those places.  For that sort of disruption, though, we should perhaps look outside the sector, because it will not come from within.

[Edits for clarity were made to the original post, on 28 August, about five hours after posting.]

[1] Fiori, J. et al. (2016) The Echo Chamber: Results, Management, and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda. London: Save the Children, p. 54.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Privilege of Control

2 Comments

Anti-racism protests have prompted unprecedented conversations across many parts of the humanitarian sector.  Institutions and their leaders have raised their hands as witnesses and responders to the destructive practices of racism, and to being spreaders and perpetrators of it.  There is a flow of apology and commitment.  We see strong vows to change, to listen, to understand, to do better, to open up uncomfortable spaces, to rectify, and to eradicate.  An odd gap in this litany of promises?  Reckoning.  Justice.

Let us begin with the simple fact that various forms of racial discrimination – both individualized acts of racial discrimination and institutional racism – are not examples of bad behavior.  They are examples of wrong behavior.  They are deemed in much of the world to be an offense, usually a civil offense but in some states a criminal offense.  Legal codes attach this gravity to racism because racial discrimination and racism (just as sexism, etc.) constitutes an act of direct harm upon an individual, and it is a particularly insidious category of harm because it targets and violates that which is immutable about a human being.

In a textbook display of privilege, agencies within the sector have assumed the capacity to act as both defendant and judge or jury. Defining the boundaries of how they will talk about addressing their racism marks an appropriation, so for instance deciding to look forward but deflecting accountability for the present or the past.  Angela Bruce-Raeburn asks the question that is erased by these declarations:  “Can a chief executive ‘apologise’ for racism and stay?”

This is a particular exercise of privilege, because it both masks and is a product of our virtue. As I’ve written before, the legitimacy of the sector is challenged by its susceptibility to moral licensing, allowing its good works to facilitate or counterbalance bad stuff. We downplay the offense and then rationalize our actions.  Why such persistent difficulties with community engagement, localisation or ‘downward’ accountability? Because we justify our inaction and allow our racism to hide in the plain sight of “power over” policies or practices of knowing what is best for them.  Move fast fast fast and you do not notice.  Beware the strong resemblance to the original humanitarian sin of its colonial legacy, the enterprise of subjugation and resource extraction being justified by the civilizing mission.

Self-accountability

In the almost 25 years since the JEFAR first recommended that humanitarians needed to be held accountable by an independent body, the sector has devoted consistent, massive effort to producing codes of self-accountability, an ever-expanding lists of best practices, standards, targets and other technocratic non-fixes to the problem of the sector’s social injustice.[1] Complaint mechanisms, suggestion boxes, agency hotlines and help desks are emblematic of the twinned mindsets of privilege and of charity, a uniquely inebriating potion that mixes good intentions with an (un)conscious “it’s better than nothing” (“happy to get something”?) rationalisation of sectoral shortcomings.  In the end, the underlying distinction of humanitarian accountability is that it does not produce the state in which an agency must give and then be held to account for its decisions and actions. Aid requires a reckoning.  And when an offense is committed, it demands justice as well.

The starting point of the internal discussions to come should be letters of resignation. It is not for me to say if they should be accepted, but they should be sincere and on the table. Truth and reconciliation? Independent adjudicators? National inquiries in the countries where aid takes place? Grace? This is easier for me to write than to now predict if I would have had the integrity to submit my own back when I was director.  I made the choice to remain, a choice rationalized by the good being done and by my occasional and completely ineffective protestations. My decision marked the mistaken weighing of moral obligations against programmatic output.

Critical to change is recognition that weak sectoral and negligible external accountability do not give rise to or permit racism in humanitarian action.  The problem to be addressed is the reverse. Racism gives rise to the sector’s insufficient accountability. The solution is simple in theory.  As Themrise Khan astutely argues, “it is the aid ‘recipients’ who must push back against the white aid system”. Accountability is not an internal treasure for the dominant agencies of the Global North to bequeath, but rather a power, authority and even a vocabulary that will need to be taken and will need to be constructed. 

To do that, society must counter the sector having approached accountability as an internal or isolated exercise.  MEAL programs and internal reporting can and do contribute to accountability, but accountability requires a multiplicity of external prongs.  This is what you would find in the West, where accountability for the work in an NGO (or business) arises from the independent work of journalists, review-based websites (coming soon?), official ombudsmen, law enforcement, lawsuits, citizen watch-dog groups, government regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc. The blindspot should now be apparent. Efforts to improve governance and strengthen civil society should be pushing for the requisite frameworks and skills to hold foreign aid agencies to account and protect people from harm.  The neo-colonial gaze means never seeing ourselves as the problem to fix, and yet we exert enormous power over the lives of people in crisis.

The external equivalent of Bruce-Raeburn’s taking issue with non-resignation resides in the governments and civil societies of the states and communities where humanitarians work.  How can an organisation that understands itself to have racism threading through its work and culture – driving the conceptualization of programs, framing the narrative and imagery of ‘heroic’ aid, suffusing the relationship with its employees – simply assume that it should or is able to remain engaged in said work? In other words, what is the significance of and process by which we construct ourselves as fit for the purpose of delivering assistance and protection to (predominantly) people of color? This is white privilege at work. Accountability for its racism requires resignation of the humanitarian project, to be accepted or rejected by the governments and communities that have suffered the offense. 

[21/July: I made two edits to this post — minor cosmetic changes in the first para and the insertion of a missing “not” in the fifth para.]

[1] While there is considerable external accountability to HQ or institutional donors, this relates more to responsible financial management and log-framed targets, and not to the character of the aid or to the relationship of the agency to the community.

Our Western Identity, Politics

The Test of the Times

2 Comments

The Road to Recognition

Who or what has most triggered change in the humanitarian sector over the past five years?  Arguably, the answer to that question is either Harvey Weinstein or the ancient humans who invented cash.  If we ask ourselves that same question in 2025, the answer may prove similarly disturbing. It may be Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.  Of course, such a disturbance is to be applauded even as our dependence on such external triggers should raise searching questions. Phenomena like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter spotlight a moral and operational indolence and an active hypocrisy at the heart of our humanitarian action. A humanitarian sector should not require being pressed into these discussions (this evolution!) by threats to our income and image.

Like sexism, the racism and abusive power dynamics in the sector constitute in large part a category even Donald Rumsfeld failed to see – the “unknown known”.  This is a set of assumptions, beliefs and ideologies that remain invisible or inert within the central cultural power block of the sector, and yet perfectly obvious to those who suffer it every day. It takes powerful lenses to filter out such tragic disempowerment.  We see it and even denounce it elsewhere, but somehow not when we look at our organizations.  I see it, but somehow not when I look in the mirror.  Or even more accurately: somehow I do not see it enough to act.

[Digression warning] I am reminded of plastic-coated coffee cups.  For decades now I certainly understood the environmental cost of throwing out hundreds of cups each year.  Shazam!  One day I suddenly saw it in a way that mattered. I bought a reusable cup, along with tens of millions of other people.  A miraculously swift change. No campaign, no acronymed initiative, no tax incentive.  Can we bottle that? Deploy it elsewhere?  How do we understand that change of perspective; that noticing? And how do we avoid the infinitesimal sacrifice (the self-satisfaction?) of buying a reusable cup not later rationalizing, say, the decision to fly off on a weekend break? [Digression over]

Given the ‘revelations’ of the past months, humanitarians no longer have the option of avoiding the mirror, for historical and institutional racism is now visibly central to the humanitarian project and elemental to outing our deeply internalized paternalism (read: colonialism).  And shazam!, there now seems to be an internal momentum. The issues at stake – staying with them over time and not launching ourselves into the next crisis or exciting initiative – will test the sector and test humanitarians.  In a sector with a pronounced short-term gaze, endurance must be questioned.  Prolonged discomfort does not fit well with a sector designed in part to help its inhabitants feel good. White privilege is bad enough. White savior privilege might be its most toxic strain.

As many have said, the sector needs to listen (and here).  Further, we within the sector need to recognize.  Listening will help us recognize the pain as well as the opportunities.  But we also need to recognize the thing itself.  What do white privilege, discriminatory decisions, rasicst structures and interwoven coloniality actually look like in policy and practice (and let’s not forget the power dynamics of inequality or sexism)? Some instances are shockingly easy to spot.  Some not. We need to build awareness of the telltale signs, an Audubon catalogue of ‘invisible’ visibility and subterranean workings.  How has racism so successfully ‘hidden’ in plain sight, overlooked in our echo-chamberous institutions or casually justified by appeal to our ‘exceptional’ objectives?  Should we test sectoral decision-makers for this ability/sensitivity, just as we already test to ensure key qualities or certify expertise in other areas?  And should we as individuals test ourselves, to see if our awareness of (e.g.,) racism is improving?

A Simple Test

Talking on a news program about the COVID pandemic, a French doctor opined, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?”  What do you think? Did this off-handed idea sound reasonable, a way of testing a potential vaccine in real-world conditions, and self-aware to being ‘provocative’?  Or did you find it revolting?  WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was swift and blunt in his denunciation: “Africa can’t and won’t be a testing ground for any vaccine.”  The story spread. Ivoirian footballer Didier Drogba called it ‘absolutely disgusting’. In today’s world, that’s actually a denunciation a billion or so people might hear about.

Contrast the French doctor’s provocation to the declaration of the “Inclusive Vaccine Alliance”, formed by the governments of France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.  By working together as an alliance, they hope to reach a successful vaccine quicker, and then allow other EU members an opportunity to use it. In addition the Alliance “is also working to make a portion of vaccines available to low-income countries, including in Africa.”  [Add three clapping hands emojis here].

I now need to apologize for conducting an experiment of sorts.  Did you spot the problem with the statement of the four governments? I am indebted to the Open Society’s A. Kayum Ahmed for this example, and I would encourage all readers to go to his dissection of the Alliance’s statement, which he labels an act of “vaccine sovereignty” that portrays Africa as a “site of redemption.”.

Well, how did you fare? Did you recognize the flaws in the Alliance’s statement? Or did it slide by because it so resembles the dozens of ‘innocuous’ statements we read every day? My score? Maybe a D+.  I thought the word “portion” sounded measly, prompting an image of Oliver Twist begging for more porridge, and I sensed though did not identify the deeper issue raised by Ahmed.

What is the Target?

Which statement exemplifies the bigger problem for the sector, the necessary objective of our calls to address systemic racism?  Is it the doctor’s statement, because of the overt denigration and the hurt it caused millions of viewers? Easier to spot. Easier to reach agreement against.  Easier to address. Easier to make progress. But is it also easier to demonize, and does it thereby help mask the insidious, incremental ‘invisibility’ of the Alliance’s statement?

Like many have said, this is not going to be easy.

            *                                         *                                         *                                        

[Final Note: Even if you disagree with Ahmed or me about the racism in the Alliance’s statement, you still need to spot it as a potential issue.  Think security management.  The only way to identify signs of insecurity is to spot and then investigate potential signs of insecurity. The requirement, hence, is a quantum leap in our sensitivity to racism.]