white saviorism

English

Etymology

white savior +‎ -ism

Noun

white saviorism (uncountable)

1. The worldview that regards white people as saviors and other groups as needing to be saved by them.
   • 2015, Keith M. Sturges, editor, Neoliberalizing Educational Reform, →ISBN, page 117:

     White saviorism is a form of false generosity; it maintains and embodies white supremacy; it frames the white outsider as the savior and hero and the people of color as too oppressed, too downtrodden, too powerless to help themselves.

   • 2016, Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White‎^[1], NYU Press, →ISBN:

     White saviorism reinforces the goodness of whites by arguing that whites must lift up the Other from their state of savagery. […] In these cases, white saviorism seeks to rescue communities of color from themselves and their nonwhiteness.

Alternative forms

• white saviourism

See also

• white man's burden