WUNRN
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/kamala-kempadoo/white-man%E2%80%99s-burden-revisited
Trafficking – Root Causes of
Poverty & Inequality – Neoliberal Capitalism
Trafficking Catalyst –
Imperialist Humanitarianism – Call for New Solutions
KAMALA KEMPADOO* -
11 January 2015
The war on trafficking is a contemporary imperialist move that
involves ‘the West’ saving ‘the rest’, appearing as a reconfigured version of
the ‘white man’s burden.’ Modern-day slavery abolitionism, abolitionist
feminism, and celebrity humanitarianism together make up this renewed
imperialism.
In the early 1990s the debate on human trafficking was restricted
to a handful of feminists and revolved around establishing ‘the trafficking of
women’ as a case of labour migration or one of ‘female sexual slavery.’ Two
decades later, the topic has become a household word and involves a more
complicated debate. Within this proliferation of attention on trafficking
and slavery, a convergence among some of the most vocal and visible campaigns
is discernible, looking disturbingly like a reconfigured ‘white man’s burden.’
The ‘burden’ has at least two dimensions. One is that the dominant
anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns are primarily inspired by, located
in, and directed from within racialised ‘developed’ centres of the world. The
antislavery movement, for example, is dominated by white middle-class or elite
men—in the US, Britain and Australia—who founded the majority of international
organisations and populate executive boards and directorships, with the resources
and cultural capital to produce books, news items, and films on the subject.
People of color and non-westerners are positioned in their campaigns as objects
for rescue and education, modern-day ‘slaveholders,’ or ‘survivor leaders.’
With unquestioned obligation and entitlement to intervene, and
convinced of their righteousness, modern anti-slavery men feel free to roam the
earth saving poor people. Histories of earlier abolitionist movements as
steeped in white guilt, fear of black violence, distrust of black men,
paternalism, conservative Christian values, and an uncomfortable politic
between whites and blacks over social equality, are not addressed. Instead the
campaigns feature the daring white knight morally obligated to save the
world—especially Asia and Africa—affirming white masculinity as powerful and
heroic.
Abolitionist feminism extends this ‘burden’ to white middle-class
and elite women. Rooted in the 19th century white slavery discourse that
spawned maternal feminist charitable rescue work, the movement locates its
moral obligation and civic responsibility in the rescue of poor ’prostituted’
women and children (victims) from male privilege, power, and lust (sex
trafficking). It reproduces a colonial maternalism in relation to the impoverished
non-western world, while reconfirming the white western middle-class woman as
benevolent. The uncomfortable politic between white radical feminism and ‘third
world,’ black and postcolonial feminisms is pushed aside in favour of an
essentialising notion of global victimized womanhood.
Both types of abolitionist politics inform celebrity humanitarian
campaigns against trafficking, starring Demi Moore, Emma Thompson, Mira Sorvino
and more. Celebrity humanitarianism is broadcast widely—hearts are in the right
place, pockets deep, and star status focuses attention on a problem believed to
be one of the worlds’ most heinous. Yet as Dina Haynes points out, “their often
ill-informed characterisations of the problem and its potential solutions lead
to unintended consequences, misallocated funds, and misdirected victim
services” even while they are designated “heroes.”
Accolades for such anti-trafficking and antislavery work include a
Pulitzer and an Emmy, honorary doctorates, and awards for human rights and
peace work. Campaigners in the Global North applaud and celebrate each other.
White privilege rules.
Second, while global inequality in wealth is acknowledged as the
economic context within which trafficking and slavery occurs, global capitalism
is not targeted for eradication. Corrupt and greedy individuals, ‘bad’
corporations that violate labour laws, and isolated national governments that
oppose ‘the West’ (think Cuba, South Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc.),
become the problem. Campaigners work to bring these ‘rogues’ into compliance
with hegemonic (western, capitalist) standards and values.
The resulting regulations produce more criminalisation of greater
areas of human life, leaving the source of inequality intact. As one American
journalist puts it, “more capitalism is needed to bring more people
out of poverty, and [it] can also be the most effective tool to bring people
out of slavery.” Even so, the ‘big bang approach’—the injection of large sums
into poor areas or communities by philanthropists such as Bill Gates or Jeffrey
Sachs—is not a workable solution. Charity is not sustainable economic development.
But this work propels CEOs into the limelight and alleviates the guilt of those
whose grotesque wealth was accumulated off the sweat and blood of millions of
others. By naturalising neoliberal capitalism as “the only game in town,” as
Ilan Kapoor puts it in Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity,
the ‘white man’s burden’ not only masks but depoliticizes the workings of the
global economy.
In sum,
modern-day slavery abolitionism, abolitionist feminisms and celebrity
humanitarianism combine to create a neoliberal white chivalrous crusade across
the world, born of a moral sense of goodness, with the ‘developing’ Global
South and East as the dumping grounds for, what Barbara Heron calls in Desire for Development, “helping
imperatives” involving rescue and charity. Suffering bodies are captured,
rehabilitated and returned home (preferably with a photo shoot of smiling brown
or black children as proof). The fantasy of help legitimises the endeavours as
altruistic and humanitarian, obscuring the reliance on and reproduction of,
racial knowledge about the Other. This knowledge settles around the historical
tropes of the hopeless, impoverished victim incapable of attending to their own
needs, and of the benevolent, civilizing white subject who must bear the burden
of intervening in the Global South. With no effect on the causes of the
problem and, indeed, advocating more neoliberal regulation and stronger corporate
capitalism, imperialism is given a new lease of life.
*Kamala Kempadoo is Professor in the
Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She has
been working on the issue of sex work and trafficking since the early 1990s,
and has published widely on both from critical antiracist and transnational
feminist perspectives.