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- Thread starter Layce Erayce
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Hey thanks.
He said something to the effect of "Lac, I admire your compassion towards the orphans and the starving, but really, those tearjerker television commercials don't actually represent the suffering and grief of actual orphans. Let go of the Western lens and take a moment to understand what it's like to be in their shoes. In their shoes, hunger is not a tragedy, it's a fact. Disease is not a dramatic scene in an act in the moralizing western mindset, it's an ordinary feature of life. Westerners need to stop emotionalizing and moralizing on the basis of these feelings because these feelings are fictional constructs of the westerner's mind."
Paraphrasing, of course.
But that message lived with me. It is a constant reminder to me not to concoct my own narrative when I want to help people, but to let them tell their own story, interpret their own situation, and draw the conclusions they think ought to be drawn. His words became the vaccine to my white savior complex.
He said something to the effect of "Lac, I admire your compassion towards the orphans and the starving, but really, those tearjerker television commercials don't actually represent the suffering and grief of actual orphans. Let go of the Western lens and take a moment to understand what it's like to be in their shoes. In their shoes, hunger is not a tragedy, it's a fact. Disease is not a dramatic scene in an act in the moralizing western mindset, it's an ordinary feature of life. Westerners need to stop emotionalizing and moralizing on the basis of these feelings because these feelings are fictional constructs of the westerner's mind."
Paraphrasing, of course.
But that message lived with me. It is a constant reminder to me not to concoct my own narrative when I want to help people, but to let them tell their own story, interpret their own situation, and draw the conclusions they think ought to be drawn. His words became the vaccine to my white savior complex.
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