class notes on white saviors

Long time no post! Lots of happenings in the world of me keeping me too busy to write about my real life. But today I did some homework for a class on politics and science fiction, and I wanted to post it because I felt like I maybe had a good idea.

The “white savior” trope—or as I have known some angrier parts of fandom to call it, “what these folks need is a honky”—was a facet of Avatar I recognized and reacted to almost instantly. It’s a problematic part of a lot of the scifi I enjoy. It describes Daniel Jackson’s relationship to the people of Abydos in Stargate, where the oppressed people are actually darker human beings, a hypothetical uncontacted tribe (separated from our global civilization by by space travel), rather than aliens stand-ins. It can be applied to a lot of episodes of Star Trek, given Starfleet crews’ tendency to violate the Prime Directive and step in to save the day, though I think the most interesting case is essentially the full run of DS9, where the Federation/America and species/race metaphors mean that a black actor, Avery Brooks, plays the human (metaphorically white) savior to the oppressed/developing nation of Bajorans, whose most common onscreen representatives (Major Kira, some recurring characters like Vedek Bareil and Kai Winn) are played by white actors. I’ve never been sure whether I should be impressed by that inversion or troubled by the perpetuation of the trope in a form that’s less likely to be recognized as what the io9 Avatar review calls it: a white liberal guilt fantasy.
I think the “white savior” trope is related to the “white man’s burden” trope that fiction, scifi and otherwise, took from Kipling. It may even be a form of progress, the notion that it’s the white person’s responsibility not necessarily to perform racial uplift and bring civilization to supposedly uncivilized people, but instead to protect these groups’ culture, that their way of life is valid (just as the concept of the “white man’s burden” was at least progress from the notion that these savage barbarians were like animals, subhuman, not people European colonists could interact with and should afford respect to as human beings). However it is still paternalistic, patronizing and insulting to presume that a white person needs to be involved in that, that indigenous peoples can’t speak for themselves.
All of this made it really, deeply troubling to me to read how James Cameron seems to be living out the “white savior” fantasy.
On the one hand, the kind of filmmaking he’s describing, “emotionaliz[ing]” environmental issues as he is quoted in the New York Times article, is exactly the kind of filmmaking I want to do, using the power of entertainment media to get people’s attention. And he is in a position of privilege and power; how should he use it? My idealistic, utopian streak says he shouldn’t use it at all, that we should all be trying to deconstruct privilege, but people with power are rarely willing to give up power and one of the most effective tools at fighting privilege in our dystopic world is people with both privilege and morals using their privilege to help those without privilege. I think in the case of the Dongria Kondh, where they asked him for help, decided for themselves to try to use someone they hoped their oppressors might be more willing to listen to, that’s valid, justified. I am less comfortable with the idea of Cameron being promoted to Amazonian tribes who hadn’t heard of him, with showings of Avatar to introduce him as a potential advocate. In general, the whole issue makes me gag a little.
I think the next step up, the next trope, needs to be to move to white people who have power and want to help oppressed peoples to use their power in an introductory mode, to help actual members of oppressed groups gain a platform to speak and to encourage their oppressors to listen, rather than the white person doing the talking for them. Maybe we can call it the “white sponsor” trope. Maybe if I start writing the model into fiction it might get more traction as a real world behavior. It’s still imperfect, paternalistic, granting (the existence of) white privilege, and but I think would be a step in the right direction.