White saviours are high on their own virtue

And the high is the big reward.

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This is the second part in the woke word salad series.  Apologies for being late; there have been two emergency room visits in the last week, and surgery is tomorrow. The joy of a big mother kidney stone. Or father.  Sorry.  Non-binary. 

The “woke” part of the word “salad bowl” describes a situation in which users are more interested in signalling that they are taking action on an issue than in making meaningful changes. Signalling obsessions rarely cross into the realm of self-awareness and may not be fully known to those around the signaler. However, sensitive observers still detect that something is off.

To be woke today is not a compliment. The term itself mocks the woke’s perspective on all that don’t share their perspective - or more often their language or word use- that they would say they are asleep, entirely without connection to their surrounding space.   

When those who proclaim themselves woke begin mindlessly using words like “justice” and “equity,” words that innocently poke out of their deep political foundations and proclaim themselves reformed as simple definitions, the users of such language end up as servers of woke word salad.

Very often, such language is more driven by the user’s desire to convince themselves or mark territory than it is to advance understanding. As I take my five-year-old Westie out for a walk, he wants to stop at every fence or utility box, take a whiff of two-day-old urine, and mark it as Tobyland.  It’s similar.  And with Toby, of course, it’s not his land; his marking will get peed overtop and re-marked, and his territory is delusory. 

White saviours tend to be eager consumers of woke word salad. 

By definition, white saviours are “woke,” driven by a mix of virtue and a desire to make others aware of their virtue. If there were a white saviour Olympics, I still think that Rachel Anne Dolezal, the white lady who became the NAACP's chapter president, would top the podium. She loved self-tanners and black people. A white lady leading the NAACP?

I can only guess at the reaction to this news. 

Discouragement? To have a white person sit at the head of an organization dedicated to the advancement of coloured people seems wrong on so many levels;  is it like the parent who, for the ninth-grade speech competition, writes their child’s speech and allows no input, controlling every intonation, gesture, segway; turning the child’s exercise into a vanity competition waged against other parents?

No, it’s worse. This would mean the parent dressed up like their 14-year-old went on stage and made their child hang out by the snack bar. At the same time, they pretended to be their poor child. 

But white saviours rarely involve Coppertone in their endeavours.  The key to understanding them is in the name; the vibe is supposed to be Lord and Saviour, as in divine mission.  They may not have a messianic complex per se, but the capital S part of their vibe is that they tend to be wildly convinced of their mission. They may overprotect; they assume knowledge at a level that can only come from lived experience.  

They have too much missionary zeal; they lean forward when they should lean back. The white saviour self-rates themself as having so many points from caring and faux empathy that they somehow have earned the right to say, “I fully understand.”  When the white saviour decides they fully understand, logically, they have no further distance to travel, which is at the core of the problem. 

Self-brand management always needs to correct the incentives. White saviours, for example, do it to show off their virtues, not for the intrinsic good of any action. Sometimes, this is shown in their competitive X (Twitter) displays, like that old-time carnival sideshow. Except they weren’t hitting anything with a mallet to demonstrate their strength; they were hitting Twitter to show who could display the most moral indignation over some racial slight. 

The classic complaint with white saviours is that they focus more on short-term outcomes and less on discussions that peel back the conversational onion skin layers that move people toward awareness, healing and understanding. 

A bad sign is found in the one who says that in their pristine heart, there is nothing but pure goodwill; they have thrown off sins that have followed humanity as long as recorded history.  

No, “there is no racism in me,” they proclaim.  

Again, they have not put up a stop sign; they have put up a traffic light stuck on red. 

Is it to say that in matters racial white people can do no good, that any suggestions or thoughts from them can only be driven by the desire to improve their brand image? No, but in a society that is so driven by optics and signalling, and in situations where self-awareness is always incomplete, it would be better to tone it down. 

The recesses of self are not well-lit; they are shadowy, clammy, and mouldy cave structures that are impossible to clean and tend to fall into disarray.  Clean for a while, and it looks so good, but then winds and storms come in, rocks turn, and it is apparent that cleanliness is further away than what was thought. 

White saviours are too busy trying to signal and convince others of the perfection of their racial bona vides, and sometimes their actual selves fall into neglect.  And bronzer doesn’t get them closer to walking in anyone else’s shoes.