White Savior Complex Quotes

“The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I've done in my life was trying to save the Flint youth while I was visiting there.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“They just like taking pictures...They don't care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that we would prefer they didn't do it; they just take pictures anyway, take and take.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“Despite white feminist narratives to the contrary, there is no absence of feminism inside Islam, the Black church, or any other community. The women inside those communities are doing the hard and necessary work; they don’t need white saviors, and they don’t need to structure their feminism to look like anyone else’s. They just need to not have to constantly combat the white supremacist patriarchy from the outside while they work inside their communities.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“White savior narratives embedded in feminist rhetoric tend to position the people who don't get out as not being worth the effort of engagement, of needing to be led toward progressive ideologies instead of understanding that the conversations that need to happen between the proverbial hood and the hills are ones between equals who have had to face different obstacles to arrive at the same destination.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“I represent everything that distances Richard Pryor from Peoria, Illinois' ghettos.”
― Jennifer Lee, Tarnished Angel: Surviving in the Dark Curve of Drugs, Violence, Sex, and Fame : A Memoir

“I see us as a black and white version of John and Yoko, a duet of magic and productivity. It feels as though it will last forever. Richard Pryor has finally found his panacea, me.
People look at me as Richard's deliverance: he is the tragic, self- destructive freak no longer.”
― Jennifer Lee, Tarnished Angel: Surviving in the Dark Curve of Drugs, Violence, Sex, and Fame : A Memoir