Pippa Biddle in the Dominican Republic

ADAM writes:

An acquaintance on Facebook recently posted a link to an article by Pippa Biddle, “The Problem With Little White Girls (and Boys).”

Biddle concludes that her efforts to volunteer in Tanzania and the Dominican Republic were not particularly helpful to the local populations. She basically says that she lacked the useful skills — such as fluency in the local language and experience with construction — to be effective as a volunteer, and that it would have been more effective for her to simply have stayed home, raised money, and sent the money to charity organizations abroad. Fair enough, but I found her white guilt to be grating and posturing. How typical for a white person to say that her efforts are somehow illegitimate for the very reason of her being white:

“I don’t want a little girl in Ghana, or Sri Lanka, or Indonesia to think of me when she wakes up each morning. I don’t want her to thank me for her education or medical care or new clothes. Even if I am providing the funds to get the ball rolling, I want her to think about her teacher, community leader, or mother. I want her to have a hero who she can relate to — who looks like her, is part of her culture, speaks her language, and who she might bump into on the way to school one morning.”

Liberalism creates a double-bind for its most sensitive and idealistic adherents: they desire to save the world (eliminate poverty, racism, etc.) with liberalism, yet their efforts in the third world necessarily involve a sort of cultural imperialism that the left abhors. For to provide money, education, materials, construction, or medicine to poor people in another country is to point out the obvious scarcity of those same things in that other country. This shows the objective superiority of the First World country that is giving the aid to the Third World country that is receiving the aid, and this is embarrassing and unacceptable to the sensitive leftist.

The attitude displayed in this article reminds me of the “struggle sessions” that were widespread in China during the Cultural Revolution (see Jung Chang’s family memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China). Anyone who was a landowner, shopkeeper, or was perceived as a capitalist in any way was publicly humiliated in these shaming sessions and forced to criticize himself for being a “capitalist roader,” “counter-revolutionary,” etc. Now certain white liberals in the declining West are engaged in a sort of absurd status game in which they try to show superiority to other neurotic white liberals by outdoing each other in their self-criticism and feelings of guilt over being white, middle class, bourgeois, etc.

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