White Saviorism Isn’t Help: It’s Control

By Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz - Decolonial Social Scientist and Technologist

By Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz

Oye, mira.

Let's recap what we've discovered to be true.

If you were born after 1492, then you were born in a Colonial system of white supremacy. by the 1600's, race was invented and perfected by Colonial invaders. They told the world that white skin was superior, while justifying their creation through systems with the help of the church. Slavery, Genocide, cultural erasure and epistemicide. They not only colonized land, they colonized minds, sexuality, and our ways of being. Even those who identify as white, the time to ask the most valid question is now.

If race is a social construct, then who were your people before whiteness was assigned to them? And why do you continue to operate in a system that made whiteness supreme while erasing everything sacred about who you were?

White saviorism is alive and well in 2025. It’s just wearing better branding.

It’s the white tech founder launching an “AI for Africa” startup without a single African on the leadership team.

It's the white family who adopts an African or Asian child because they think they will never get the opportunity to have a great life in their home country.

It’s the influencer who flies to Guatemala to “document poverty” for content while local organizers go unfunded and unheard.

It’s the white DEI consultant facilitating anti-racism trainings where they do all the talking, all the crying, and all the invoicing.

It’s the white philanthropist who starts a “girls’ empowerment” school in Nairobi and insists on teaching Western values, English-only instruction, and U.S. feminism, while silencing local women leaders, banning traditional practices, and exporting a savior curriculum built around her image instead of their needs.

It’s the white-led nonprofit “serving” Black and Brown communities that hires Black people to do outreach, but never invites them to the boardroom.

It’s the white woman who calls herself an ally, but centers herself in every conversation.

It’s the classroom where students are taught about Martin Luther King but not Malcolm X, and where Black history is only discussed through the lens of white intervention.

It's Hollywood movies depicting poverty/oppression porn, highlighting one white person as always being the one to change a black person's life.

• The Blind Side (2009) Sandra Bullock’s character “saves” a Black teen (Michael Oher) from poverty and molds him into a football star. The film centers her charity, not his reality, and erases the systemic issues behind his situation.

• The Help (2011) A white aspiring writer becomes the voice for Black maids in the Jim Crow South. It reduces structural racism to a feel-good tale of one white woman’s awakening, with Black women as supporting characters in her growth.

• Dangerous Minds (1995) Michelle Pfeiffer plays a white ex-Marine teacher who turns a classroom of “at-risk” Black and Latino students around with Bob Dylan lyrics and tough love. It glamorizes white intervention while flattening the students’ lived experience.

• Freedom Writers (2007) Based on a true story, Hilary Swank plays a white teacher who inspires a group of racially marginalized students through journaling. Once again, it centers her emotional journey and courage, not the students’ stories.

• Green Book (2018) This film recasts the story of world-renowned Black pianist Don Shirley through the lens of his white driver. It implies that the white character’s transformation and eventual acceptance of Shirley is the real victory.

• Hidden Figures (2016) centers the brilliance of three Black women mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, whose work was critical to NASA’s space program. The film is primarily about their genius, perseverance, and resistance within a violently segregated system. However, even this film wasn’t immune to white savior framing. It introduces a fictionalized scene where Kevin Costner’s character knocks down a “Colored” bathroom sign in an act of symbolic racial justice, an act that never happened in real life. That moment was inserted to give white audiences a redemption arc, framing his character as an enlightened, barrier-breaking ally. So while Hidden Figures is not a full white savior film like The Blind Side, it does participate in white comfort engineering, softening systemic racism and inserting moments of white heroism where there were none. That move decentered Black leadership in a story that should have been 100 percent about Black brilliance.

White saviorism is not always loud. Sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it's hidden behind good intentions and nonprofit logos. But in 2025, it’s more algorithmically amplified than ever. It’s in LinkedIn posts that go viral for saying nothing new. It’s in corporate statements crafted by white PR teams during Black History Month. It’s in AI ethics panels where the only Black person invited is there to validate the company, not to challenge it. It’s in TEDx stages, book deals, humanitarian campaigns, global fellowships, and curriculum committees, all places where whiteness still reserves the right to lead what it doesn’t live.

White saviorism is the performance of care without the surrender of control. And in a world that profits from keeping that performance going, the last thing it wants is for white people to ask the one question that could dismantle it all: “What was taken from me to make me white, and why do I keep trying to prove I’m good instead of remembering who I was before the system rewrote me? There is a remembrance that must occur within white people. A pause. A questioning and application of critical thinking that this article hopes will ignite within the reader. White saviorism survives because whiteness refuses to remember. And until that memory returns, it will keep calling itself help while reenacting the very harm it claims to oppose.

White saviorism is not kindness. It is control dressed as compassion. It is the performance of justice without the surrender of power. It is what happens when a colonial system trains white people to believe their value lies in rescuing others instead of remembering themselves. It is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working exactly as designed.

Let’s name it clearly. White saviorism is the social pattern where white people enter the struggles of Black, Indigenous, and oppressed communities in ways that re-center themselves as heroes. It often comes from people who believe they are helping. But their help is conditioned by a deeper logic. It is the logic of empire, where whiteness is always framed as more capable, more rational, more moral, more enlightened. It is not about personal malice. It is about structural programming.

This phenomenon did not begin with Instagram influencers posing with Black children in Kenya. It began with the colonial Church. European missionaries were sent to convert Indigenous peoples not for spiritual awakening but to prepare the land and the people for conquest. They introduced Jesus as savior and erased the spirits and systems that had governed those communities for centuries. They baptized children while burning sacred practices. They framed entire nations as helpless and savage in need of civilizing. That framework is still the blueprint for how white saviorism operates today.

In the 1800s, British and American abolitionists, while instrumental in ending slavery, also insisted that freedom for Black people must come through white-led moral reform. They framed themselves as the architects of liberation while denying Black agency. During the same period, white women in the suffragette movement excluded Black women from leadership while claiming to fight for “all women.” Even humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and global development efforts today are largely controlled by white-led organizations that extract stories, resources, and cultural credibility from the Global South without sharing decision-making or ownership.

This is white saviorism. It is not support. It is supremacy by another name.

But underneath this pattern lies something deeper that most white people have never been allowed to face. The truth is that white saviorism is not born from abundance. It is born from absence. It is not born from understanding. It is born from forgetting.

As much as you were taught that being American, or being white is an identity, it's not. It's truly an unsustainable fabrication that weaponizes you, abuses you, and keeps you distracted while using every fiber of your existence to maintain an oppressive system. It's branding. It is a system of control. It was invented during European colonial expansion as a way to rank, divide, and dominate. Before whiteness, people were not white. They were Irish, Slavic, Basque, Sicilian, Scottish, Germanic. They had languages, land-based rituals, cosmologies, matrilineal kinship systems, ceremonies, and spiritual technologies rooted in time and place. But empire needed hierarchy. And so it demanded obedience in exchange for survival. Why do you think the Irish and Italians once faced extreme racism, but now are seen as white in the United States? They were given access to whiteness by the government.

The Crown. The Church. The State. These forces told Europeans that in order to belong to empire, they must forget where they came from. They must trade clan for flag. Goddess for cross. Ritual for doctrine. And in exchange, they would be labeled white. Whiteness was not a gift. It was a muzzle. It replaced culture with dominance and called it normal. It erased memory and replaced it with superiority. And for generations, that lie was passed down through laws, media, schools, and silence.

That is why so many white people today feel a spiritual emptiness they cannot name. That is why they consume other cultures as if trying to fill a hole they cannot see. That is why they feel compelled to help, to fix, to rescue, even when they are uninvited. They are not acting from clarity. They are reacting to rupture.

They were never given tools for grief. Only scripts for guilt.

They were never taught how to remember. Only how to perform.

And so when they encounter racism, injustice, and the pain of communities they were taught to dominate, their nervous systems go into overdrive. They default to doing instead of listening. Fixing instead of following. Leading instead of learning. Because the truth is too painful to hold. The truth that whiteness stole not just the lives and lands of others, but the very identities of those it claimed to uplift. The truth that whiteness is a brand, not a birthright.

This is trauma. And trauma left unresolved becomes projection. That projection becomes saviorism.

This is why DEI efforts often fail. Most DEI programs are not rooted in decolonial frameworks. They center white discomfort. They focus on inclusion without interrogation. They ask people of color to educate and perform pain while white leadership keeps control. They create optics instead of redistribution. And they often reward white people for surface-level allyship while penalizing those who speak truth to power.

Real justice work does not need white saviors. It needs white people who are willing to remember. Not who they became under empire, but who they were before it. It needs white people to grieve what was stolen from them. The languages they forgot. The traditions they mocked. The ceremonies they abandoned. The gods they silenced. The ways of living that were replaced with conquest, extraction, and shame.

It needs white people to ask different questions. Not how can I help, but what do I need to unlearn. Not how do I lead, but how do I step back. Not how can I be seen as good, but how do I confront the lies I was raised inside of. Not how do I speak, but how do I listen, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it destabilizes who I thought I was.

You cannot dismantle white supremacy while still clinging to the privileges it gave you. You cannot undo oppression while centering your own image. You cannot build liberation on top of performance.

If you feel lost, that is good. If you feel grief, that is right. You are not meant to save anyone. You are meant to return to the parts of yourself whiteness buried. And from there, in the quiet, without applause, you can begin the real work. The ancestral work. The decolonial work. The collective work. The work that centers truth instead of ego. The work that makes you human again.

This is not about guilt. This is about reckoning.

Because the only people who ever needed saving were the ones empire convinced were already free.

Key Decolonial Books & Sources for Citing Your Article

🧠 1. White Saviorism and Colonial Logic

• Teju Cole (2012). “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic.

• Barbara Heron (2007). Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative.

• Edward Said (1978). Orientalism.

---

🧬 2. Whiteness as Systemic Erasure of Ancestral Identity

• David Roediger (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.

• Nell Irvin Painter (2010). The History of White People.

• Robin DiAngelo (2018). White Fragility. (with caution)

---

📚 3. Colonization of the Mind and Cultural Displacement

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986). Decolonising the Mind.

• Frantz Fanon (1952). Black Skin, White Masks.

• Walter Mignolo (2007). “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality.” Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2-3.

---

🌍 4. Decolonial Frameworks

• Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012). “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1.

• Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.

---

🤖 5. White Saviorism in Media, Film, and Tech

• Matthew Hughey (2014). The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption.

• Ruha Benjamin (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.

---

Grounded in Indigenous or Afro-Indigenous Thought

• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance.

• Afro-Indigenous Rising: Ashon Crawley, Tiffany Lethabo King, and others in the Black and Indigenous Futurisms canon