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Title
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“Heart to Help”: Producing Whiteness in Development NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa
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Creator
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O’Neal, Jen
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Date
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2016-06-28
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Date Available
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2016-06-28
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Date Issued
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2016
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uri
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https://collections.southwestern.edu/s/suscholar/item/78
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Abstract
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“Talking about race in development is like breaking a taboo” (White, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to break this taboo and to examine how race works in development organizations. Although the body of scholarly literature around development has grown, very little attention has been given to the racialized structures within development and how development organizations might serve as sites of racialization. This paper is an attempt to attend to this gap with a particular emphasis on how whiteness is performed in the context of western-run non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in sub-Saharan Africa. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews and auto-ethnography gathered over the course of 2009-2015, I analyze how whiteness is performed in the “racializing assemblages” (Weheliye, 2014), racialized spaces, and racial hierarchies that constitute NGOs. Although never explicitly expressed, whiteness is not only present in the every day workings of these NGOs, these organizations are critical sites for the reproduction and reinforcement of whiteness and its discursive separation from blackness and Africa.
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Language
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English
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Subject
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Whiteness
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Racism
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sub-Saharan Africa
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NGOs
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Development organizations
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Racialization
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Type
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Thesis
