The Peace Corps and White Saviorism

Sixty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. “Every young American who participates in the Peace Corps — who works in a foreign land — will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man the decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace,” Kennedy declared.

In other words, we’ll be white saviors.

That’s what many of my students think when they hear about the Peace Corps. Pictures of young white Americans trekking through jungles or hugging Black and Brown children conjure the “white-savior industrial complex,” which Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole coined in a well-known 2012 article. Americans who went abroad to “save” the world placed their own needs and fantasies over their hosts, who “ought to be consulted on the matters that concern them,” Cole cautioned.

That’s true, of course. For too long, too many Westerners have assumed that they know what’s best for others, even when they know little or nothing at all.

That was pretty much me in 1983, when I joined the Peace Corps and headed off to Nepal to teach English. I was 22 years old, and my only teaching experience was tutoring a rich private-school kid while I was in college.

It didn’t take me long to find out how little I knew. But I learned as I went along. And I also discovered that the critique of white saviors could embody its own version of, yes, white saviorism.

During my second year of service, a student burst into my classroom and announced that he had seen my “friend” in the river valley below our hilltop school. That could only mean one thing: Another white person had arrived.

I went outside and peered down the hill. Sure enough, there was a white guy down there. We went to investigate.

As we got closer, a man that I knew from an adjacent village accosted me. “John-Sir, your friend sold me this book,” he said excitedly, holding up a crudely published pamphlet. “Only five rupees.”

I looked at the pamphlet and knew in an instant what it was. It showed a guy with long hair and a beard, hanging on a cross. In Nepali, the caption said he had died for our sins.

I kept walking, getting angrier as we got closer to my “friend.” Five rupees was what a man received for hacking away all day on the tractor road that got washed out every monsoon. Who was this guy, and what right did he have to sell his religion in Nepal?