Stop Using Human Beings as Props to Prove Your Own Virtue

I recently read Shadows on the Grass by Isak Dinesen. (The shadows are the African people btw)

Why am I about to call out such an old book for racism? Why bother picking apart the noble savage/white savior themes prevalent throughout this book?

1) Because this is a massively influential book. Dinesen’s books have been widely recognized as “literary.” although do we maybe think that’s because she was born into a noble family that, as the bio at the back of the book says, had a “tradition of making contributions to Danish literature.” Like maybe it’s not objectively good. Maybe certain people of a certain class with particular connections have their worked judged “literary” simply because it’s expected to be literary. I mean, has it ever struck anyone else as weird that all the most well-known poets/novelists of the romantic era hung out together. Literally just basically one clique of rich white kids. Anyhow, earned or not, Dinesen is regarded as one of those “important” and “literary” writers, because all the right people said so, and of course the literary world wouldn’t be influenced by money or status, right?

2) Because you should call out evil shit when you see it. Not to punish people (because hello, lady is dead) but because a society needs a shared value system, at least to some degree.
Also, people be giving Dinesen a pass because “it was a different time” and then calling out male colonizers who said or did awful shit.
The leeway given to people of the past for racism is not applied consistently. I see a clear gender bias and I’m not having it.
If we’re calling out past racist shit, we’re calling out past racist shit.
And this book is some racist shit.

But mostly…

3) There is too much of this white savior/noble savage shit still prevalent today. Social justice warriors/ “allies and advocates”/whatever the hell you’re calling yourselves now: I am looking at you. All the “poor widdle black people” shit y’all do is gross and reeks of this very insidious, but just as deeply evil, white supremacy. I saw a lot of it during the George Floyd riots. A lot of proud left-wingers declaring that people of color were reacting with violence due to the trauma of racism, and that they saw no other way to make their voices heard. Anyone who thinks black people are basically children, so low-functioning that the only way they can communicate is with violence and property destruction, IS A FUCKING RACIST. And when I say things like “anti-racism is actually really fucking racist”-that’s the kind of nonsense I mean. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want. If you think black people need white people to save them, OR you go around trying to prove what a good woke white person you are-using BIPOC individuals (or gay people or trans people or whatever group of people) as a PROP to prove your own virtue, if you can not discuss a particular group without bringing their oppression and pain into it and fetishizing the hell out of said pain, you are perpetuating the noble savage/white savior dichotomy (or some other variation of oppressor/subaltern dichotomy) and it’s gross. And you should be ashamed.

All you gotta do in this world is be decent and treat people with dignity and respect.

Treating other humans as props to prove your own virtue is not decent.

And we get a LOT of it in this book. It’s an old book. but since this “look at me saving these poor widdle people” shit is still prevalent today, we’ve gotta call it out. Too many Isak Dinesesn white ladies in this world still.

This entire book is her bragging about everything she did for the African people and how much they loved her. Like I’m glad she sent Abdullahi to school and bought him a typewriter. I’m glad he went on to become a judge, and yes, she probably had a hand in that. She sure jerked herself the hell off over it. She also spent a massive percentage of the word count telling us about how she protected the native people from the government, how she advocated and fought for them, how she drove them to the hospital when they were injured or sick.

This lady is a literal colonizer. She actually says that Kenya had a climate “in which white people could not take on manual labor.” These people injure themselves working on HER coffee plantation. She doesn’t mention that though. She just gives herself a nice long handjob over how she doctored them when injured. And yes, not ALL their injuries were work-induced. As she says, they often slept around open fires, so this was not the result of working her farm. I’m still quite a bit put off by her not mentioning that they workers are injured working HER farm.

Maybe it’s just the fact that she is farming African land with African bodies and reaping the rewards of it (I know her farm went under, but with World War 2 just on the horizon, business and trade was bound to be bad for many industries-that doesn’t mean she didn’t reap colonizer rewards for a good long time). She pilfers African soil with African bodies all while crowing about what a good person she is.

I think my problem is this: everybody stop crowing about what a good person you are. Everybody stop focusing so much on intrinsic traits. Everybody I meet who is this focused on intrinsic traits ends up being a massive asshole using the pain of others as a prop to prove their own goodness.
Everybody stop trying to prove how good you are. You’re not good. Nobody is good. Everybody is a selfish asshole, but you can at least be decent. You can at least treat people with dignity. “I’m a good woke white person saving all the poor widdle black people” is absolutely, decidedly not decent.

And I’ll end my rant with some of the crowning jewels of this incredibly racist book that strays from white savior shit into actual Eugenics several times.

“The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me on the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of white children of the same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to that of a European child of nine.”

-That passage definitely reminds me of the flavor of progressives who claim it’s racist to grade for grammar (apparently black people can’t learn grammar-and that…….is anti-racism! Ta-da!). This is that bigotry of low expectations shit. It wears the facade of love and togetherness (Dinesen talks a good game about Unity and how much she adores the African people) but really….it’s gross. And the people who do it today in the name of “anti-racism” are also gross.

In another passage, she compares the blood on the King’s letter, blood left by her African patients, to the blood on a handkercheif from King Christian IV. She writes, “The blood on my sheet of paper is not proud or eddifying. It is the blood of a dumb nation.”

In talking about a precocious African child, she writes, “He was a small, slightly built child with a sudden, wild, flying gracefulness in all his movements and a corresponding, incalculable, crazy imagination of a kind which I have not met in any other Native child, and which maybe will have been due to that mixture of blood.”-So again with the Eugenics shit.

In writing about the ability of African people to sneak up on her, she writes, “The Africans have got this to them-they will make their presence known by other means than eyesight, hearing, or smell…Wild animals have got the same quality, but our domestic animals have lost it.”

This book reeks of the white savior narrative. It’s the same shit we still see in the popular zeitgeist. Not much has changed since Pocahontas and Avatar. We are still writing stories with magical, closer-to-nature, peaceful and placid “noble savages” who have yet to be tainted by civilization. They are spoken about as if they are an endangered species to be protected. Preserved by the oh-so-caring “good white people.”

In narratives such as these, the BIPOC individuals are fetishized, commodified for the consumption of white people who seek to grab hold of their pain-their very being-as a tool to bolster their own egos. To build up their own sense of self.

It is the worst sort of objectification and do all the mental gymnastics you want, it is NOT anti-racist.