[Peace-discuss] The White Savior Industrial Complex

[David Green]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/?single_page=true#
 
These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They  migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; I'm told they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets  were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of the Atlantic and the New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend  emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks  Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.

These sentences of mine,  written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back  from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from  many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The  Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader  points, described the language in which they were expressed as  "resentment."

This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is  best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he  often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012  video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was  why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.
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