Whiteness in transit: the racialized geographies of international volunteering

“I don’t know what’s racist”: White Invisibility Among Explicitly Color-conscious Volunteers

“…To be clear, context matters and not all whites respond to the system of white supremacy in the same way (Bell 2021;Lewis 2004), and volunteers, activists, and service providers would do well to heed the lessons of studies that complicate the nexus of whiteness and volunteering (e.g., Cann and McCloskey 2017;Droogendyk et al 2016;Endres and Gould 2009;Germann Molz 2017;Hagerman 2018;Henry 2020;Schneider 2018). Still, volunteering might present opportunities for shifts toward antiracist praxis provided that volunteers accept that critical self-reflection and evaluation of their organization is a necessary part of the service.…”

“…Other scholars draw attention to the importance of context. It's well established that whites become more cognizant of their racial identity when interacting in predominantly nonwhite spaces (Gallagher 1995(Gallagher , 1997Henry 2020;Schneider 2018), and in a time of demographic change and political mobilization, "white normality" is increasingly confronted at the local level (Bell 2021;Hughey 2021). In environments where whites are forced to confront their racial privilege, inequalities are commonly explained away through claims of individual achievement and cultural difference and/or by minimizing and naturalizing racial disparities (Bonilla-Silva 2010;Burke 2012;Croll 2013;DiTomaso et al 2003).…”

“…In recent years, scholars have paid particularly close attention to the ways whiteness operates in volunteer, activist, and service learning settings (e.g., Droogendyk et al 2016;Endres and Gould 2009;Germann Molz 2017;Henry 2020;Schneider 2018). Whiteness has been found to significantly inform volunteer goals, interactions, and perceptions (Germann Molz 2017; Henry 2020; Heron 2019; Kipp et al 2021;Lough and Carter-Black 2015;Schneider 2018).…”

Humanitarians of Instagram: The Western Gaze in a Digital Age

“…The gaze exchange which occurs between the Western viewer and the child subject in What distinguishes the digital humanitarian gaze from earlier iterations of humanitarian and tourist gazes is the environment in which it occurs. In real life, the gaze between a tourist and a host has the potential to be mutual, particularly if the tourist is a racial minority in the community they are visiting (Maoz, 2005;Henry, 2020). Largely however, the dynamic inherent to this encounter is imbalanced because it is the tourist who has the agency to travel and 'help' others, or humanitarian cosmopolitanism (Mostafanezhad, 2014).…”

“…Where the heavy contrasting allows darker skin to fall into the background, it lifts the volunteer from the setting due to her glowing skin and casts an imposing presence over the rest of the subjects. While Henry (2020) found that white volunteers are largely uncomfortable with "their newly exposed position of privilege" as the invisibility of their whiteness is reversed in majority non-white environments, they have the power to re-assert the racial power dynamic when they post photos of the experience on social media (p.7). As Sin and He (2018) point out, the curatorial nature Instagram and Facebook allow for narratives to be constructed in the volunteer's favour.…”