Paging Clueless Undergraduate White Liberal.

x-posted from U.S. of J.

The fact that the University of Virginia’s student newspaper would use the words “African magic” in a description of an op-ed should give you a few signs as to its quality (to say nothing of the op-ed itself):

“June Bug,” our rented Toyota Spark, took us everywhere we wanted to go. We started out in Constantia — one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Cape Town, South Africa — and drove out of the city into the wilderness of Stellenbosch wine country. Taking the N2 road, which stretched to the west of Cape Town, we saw Cape Town’s apparent “first world development” deteriorate into settlement townships. These townships, which are urban shanty towns created during the Apartheid era for non-whites, are now destinations for tourists to witness South Africa’s great poverty and racial inequality. But even though we were momentarily aware of the real South Africa, we easily forgot it as we arrived in Speir.

[…]

Actually, I was just a girl in gladiator sandals with an extremely large purse full of my essentials — a camera, ChapStick, sunblock and a credit card. Hence the paradox of tourism and Cape Town. Cape Town is in Africa — and yet it is Europeanized. There are cheetahs but they are in cages. There is vast beauty and wilderness but they are urbanized, too. There is wealth but it is right next to poverty. I was feeling confused by the dualistic nature of our visit. It seemed as though we were contributing to a certain type of unnameable exploitation. But if we did not visit and help boost the economy by tourism, would not the country suffer more?

Not only is this funny and easily mocked, but it points to some of the more troubling aspects of undergraduate “service” culture. At least at my alma mater, one of the more popular Spring Break choices is a program called “Alternative Spring Break,” in which a fairly large group of students travel to developing countries in order to complete a week-long service project. The problem with this model, as a lot of folks will tell you, is that there is little to no continuity between trips. Yes, missions will revisit the same communities, but the passage of a time and the lack of continuity (there is often a year between trips) makes this a moot point. In turn, this contributes to a sense that these trips are little more than glorified “poverty tourism” for young, guilty — and clueless — white liberals.

Of course, that’s not to say that the whole program is irredeemable; I know good people who have done good work on these trips. But that doesn’t change the fact that the program is contributing to a service culture that focuses on short-term projects and bandaids, with little thought to the broader, systemic issues at hand.

Jamelle

Jamelle Bouie is a writer for Slate. He has also written for The Daily Beast, The American Prospect and The Nation. His work centers on politics, race, and the intersection of the two.

You can find him on Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram as jbouie.
  • distance88

    There is wealth but it is right next to poverty. I was feeling confused by the dualistic nature of our visit.

    Obviously, this student has never seen an American city either…
    .
    The critique of these service-type programs is spot on–I think it also applies to a lot of the larger non-profit orgs too.

  • Ash

    Yeah, the same thing is happening in New Orleans. Nothing but service organizations going down there with no connection to the community. Another problem is that many of these organizations don’t take any input from the people they’re supposed to be “helping.” I do think they can have some value if they’re at least able to open the minds of a few people and inspire them to become more socially active. I feel like the trip I took was worthwhile because we are actually continuing our work in the community surrounding our school. I am aware that this isn’t usually the case. Good article. That op-ed was cringeworthy.

  • Scipio Africanus

    I find that going in on the young-and-naive isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be for me. I actually find myself feeling lame for even wanting to do it, nowadays (which, thankfully, is becoming fairly infrequent.) So when I read stuff like this I just figure she’ll have a more informed outlook on things when she’s older. In the meantime, meh.

  • Mudiwa

    As a recent college grad, I can attest to how fashionable this type of poverty tourism has become –to the extent that spending a semester or a summer in an impoverished area is now the equivalent of a prestigious internship for liberal arts, high-achieving types like me and many of my peers. On one hand, there’s nothing wrong with that, because in the aggregate, students are often engaged in practical work (building wells, teaching classes) that has tangible effects on people’s lives. But I rarely see any meaningful effort to deconstruct that “unnameable exploitation” that the writer talks about (which, as it turns out, has not only been named but is a well-established school of thought — Orientalism anyone?). And colleges, which are supposed to force students to engage in necessary yet difficult dialogues about this kind of stuff often exacerbate the problem. Most U.S. colleges’ admissions and PR materials tout how their students are using their educations to save the world and typically frame these kinds of study abroad or missions experiences in ways which are overly self-reverent and condescending to non-Westerners. That construction of Subaltern people as helpless and Western students as saviors can’t help but lead to the scenario playing out here, where a student is shocked to learn that an African country is actually industrialized, and more worryingly, is only beginning to consider the fact that she plays a significant role in systems of economic and racial oppression.

    • “is only beginning to consider the fact that she plays a significant role in systems of economic and racial oppression.”

      Actually, wouldn’t this be the desired outcome of this experience? Given how privileged most college students are, and how segregated most of the US remains, when would the typical college student at a relatively elite university like UVA have an opportunity to gain awareness of this issue? And now that she’s thinking about it, however clumsily, is the time to prod and push her to actually gain something from the experience. I don’t know much about these types of service programs, nor how the colleges reintegrate students after they’ve made them, but her question at the end of that excerpt begs for a faculty member or mentor to get her and her peers together to really grapple with what they’ve seen and how they fit in to larger structures of global poverty and inequality.