Check Your Ego: Avoiding the White Savior Complex

Photo by Jaime Lopes on Unsplash

Recently, I was part of a racial equity workshop within my department. We used a word cloud generator to learn more about our commonalities as a diverse group of people. Topics ranged from the benign, like music and food, to provocative ones like justice. Overall, it provoked great conversation and met our goals. But that wasn’t the end of the discussion.

During one of the prompts, “Our Clients,” we had predictable words used to describe the clients. I work in a non-profit workforce development organization, with clients who face a number of barriers to employment. Our clients range from refugees and English-language learners to single parents living in government-subsidized housing and all types of clients with similar challenges to employment. Words like engaged, resilient, diverse, brave, kind, optimistic all showed up in the word cloud.

The Word Cloud about our clients from the exercise with my colleagues. Image provided by the author.

These words are truthful, from the perspective of the people who shared them. And that is what we ended up talking about: our perspective.

Digging Deeper

I was prepared for this conversation. As I was preparing this exercise with the committee, I made sure to add a…