Humanitarianism invisibilizes racial hierarchies – it’s a tool Whiteness uses in order to make itself feel better while extinguishing Black and Indigenous life

Polly Pallister-Wilkins, “Saving the souls of white folk: Humanitarianism as white supremacy”, Security Dialogue, 26 October 2021,

There is a growing body of work charting how humanitarian sentiments and knowledge produced about humanitarian-ameliorative interventions became part of everyday colonial government (see Lester and Dussart, 2014). Travelling between colonial spaces – from plantation economies to white settler colonies – protecting the enslaved, newly emancipated and Indigenous communities from various forms of colonial violence, these sentiments manifested in different forms across British colonial space, while ensuring the continuation of British superiority. Ameliorative practices appeased metropolitan abolitionists while guaranteeing the continued profitability of slave economies through ameliorating the worst excesses of violence. Ameliorative polices were overseen by a ‘Protector’, usually a member of the slave-owning class, and were also intended to prepare enslaved people for a freedom yet to come by encouraging civilization through Christianization. As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart (2014: 56) suggest, ‘through their instructive relationship with slave owners, the British government hoped, they would redeem cruel and aberrant British colonial societies at the same time that they reformed the benighted subjectivities of enslaved people’. Meanwhile others, such as Seymour Drescher (2004), are even more explicit that amelioration was not about liberation for enslaved people, but following the Haitian Revolution, about more-effective ordering and regulation within an environment of revolutionary upheaval threatening white supremacy.

In writing about the souls of white folk, Du Bois ([1920] 1999: 45) clearly links European colonialism to racial categories, white supremacy and paternalist forms of government aimed at securing a white, colonial Europe:

How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.

Therefore, through seeking to relieve the worst excesses of racist violence, humanitarianism did not challenge whiteness but secured it using a range of controls that worked through logics of care helping to soothe the troubled souls of white folk concerned with both the well-being of Black and Indigenous populations and their own security at the top of racial hierarchies. Fast-forward 150 years and Young-sun Hong (2015: 14) identifies such features in Cold War humanitarianism, where biopolitical, humanitarian interventions, especially those of a medical variety, were part of a strategy for containing the communist threat.

However, any disentanglement of humanitarianism’s role in the consolidation of white supremacy requires not just a consideration of humanitarianism as a form of liberal government with colonial roots. It also requires a recognition that while humanitarianism worked – and continues to work – to relieve the violence of colonialism, ameliorative practices are and were also racializing moves producing what Alexander G. Weheliye (2014) would call a racializing assemblage within which whiteness was, and remains, supreme. For instance, alongside paternalist practices securing whiteness, humanitarian action has also demonstrated distinct anti-Black racism towards colonized Africans. In her study of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s lack of intervention during the Mau Mau rebellion, Yolanda Pringle (2017) draws attention to the perceived primitivity of African populations that rendered them outside of and incapable of comprehending humanitarian sentiments, with the result that this placed them beyond concern and assistance. In such a racializing assemblage, white supremacy is intimately tied to the production of the human and humanity as supposedly universal categories and – as Pringle’s work points out – to the concomitant negation of Black and Indigenous lives inherent within this production (see King, 2019). Here, the work of Sylvia Wynter is instructive.

Even while racism has animated and structured humanitarian practice, the figure of the universal human underpinning humanitarianism’s commitment to saving lives, relieving suffering and upholding human dignity provides humanitarianism with its normative power. However, the figure of the universal human allows humanitarianism to sidestep questions of race and racism in its practice and in historical and contemporary understandings of the human. Even in critical discussions of the ‘politics of life’ and hierarchies of humanity generated through humanitarian practice (e.g. Fassin, 2012), race and racism are a spectre haunting discussion of inequalities exterior to humanitarianism itself rather than an active animating agent. Importantly, the tensions around who is accorded full humanity that haunt wider bodies of humanist thought through proximity to, or distance from, racialized ‘states of nature’, placement on modernist gauges of development, or what Wynter (2003: 260) calls the ‘overrepresentation of (white bourgeois) Man’ in understandings of the universal human are not erased or overcome through the declaration of an ethical commitment to all human life. If we follow Wynter’s ‘human view’, such ethical commitments come into being though colonial encounters that were generative of a

culture-specific conception of being human, allowing it to be posited as if it were the universal of the human species, and ensuring thereby that all actions taken for the sake of the well-being of the human referent object continue to be perceived as if they were being taken for the sake of the human-in-general: propter nos homines. (Wynter, 1996: 43, italics in original)

Universalizing claims such as these are powerful normative moves helping to perpetuate the idea that humanitarianism is above race. These powerful normative moves erase the foundational part played by racialization in humanitarianism and its understanding of humanity. As Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin (2010: 9) have argued,

a claim to speak on behalf of humanity stakes out a powerful position. It is one of the few categories that is meaningful across political, religious, and social divides. While people may disagree on the source of its power, almost everyone agrees that humanity should be considered sacred. As a universal subject, the claims of humanity should, it seems, be paramount – and to speak on its behalf should bring discussion to a close, permit action to begin, and enable lives to be saved.

Therefore, humanitarianism’s universalizing claims invisibilize racial hierarchies and the white supremacy embedded in its foundations. Meanwhile a recalibration of the human challenges the ways in which life is universalized and rendered equal in biopolitical understandings of humanitarianism, and discussions of race confront humanitarianism with distinctly political relations that unsettle both universal norms and the claims of (professional) humanitarianism to be impartial and apolitical (see Pringle, 2017).

It should be clear by now that an acknowledgement of the Eurocentrism of humanitarianism or the dynamics of white saviourism is not enough if humanitarianism is animated and made possible by white supremacy. With this in mind, I want to ask: Are postcolonial critiques of humanitarianism enough?

Decolonizing humanitarianism?

A postcolonial critique of humanitarianism is certainly not enough when we consider the ‘repetitive process of making the modern human through extinguishing Black and Indigenous life’ (King, 2019: 39) or Rutazibwa’s (2016: 196) argument that ‘racism is the oil in the system of colonial power that makes a sustained discrimination of and violence against certain people not only possible but also invisible and acceptable’. Moving forward, race and racism need to be taken seriously as features within the structures of humanitarian thought and practice. Alongside this, it is necessary, for scholars and practitioners alike, to acknowledge that humanitarianism, with its universalist claims, acts as a salve for sustained racial discrimination and violence, working if not to entirely invisibilize racial hierarchies within suffering, then to make the racial underpinnings of such suffering acceptable through supposedly universal practices of care.