Risky Business: Race, Nonequivalence and the Humanitarian Politics of Life

Abstract

Analyses of humanitarian imagery generally highlight how images are used to mobilize empathy and collective action. Recent critical ethnographic accounts of humanitarianism have either disregarded or underplayed the role of race in the practice of humanitarianism, focusing on risk as crucial to a “humanitarian politics of life.” In this article I suggest that combining textual and visual analysis deepens the evidentiary base for claims linking race, risk and humanitarianism. I argue that heroism and humanitarianism are often conflated, and that this conflation relies on racialized perceptions of risk, in which blackness is a central mediator.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank colleagues who read earlier drafts of this article: Laurie McIntosh, Ted Gideonse, Sherine Hamdy, Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Jennifer Liu. I also received helpful comments from audiences in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas–Austin, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Colgate University, and a workshop on the Anthropology of Conflict and Post-conflict Interventions at Harvard University. Many thanks too to Christos Lynteris and Ruth Jane Prince for their generous, careful and insightful feedback.

Notes

In fact, when I mentioned to an acquaintance that I was writing about Salma Hayek some six years later, she asked, “Is she still breast-feeding African babies?".

In this article, I am concerned with humanitarianism as broadly defined both within popular culture (as a kind of heroic sentimentalism) and as a professional practice that operates bureaucratically. Professional humanitarianism usually refers to institutional responses to complex humanitarian emergencies, which are short-term and address urgent issues like water, sanitation, protection and disease control. In defining humanitarianism as an ethical practice (re)mediating inequalities, I want to call attention to how “humanitarianism” becomes a proxy for social justice activism, “heroic deeds,” or the various cultural and discursive manifestations driven by this type of ethos.

Harrell-Bond, De Waal, and Napier-Moore all highlight the asymmetrical nature of “giving” relationships that characterize humanitarianism, as well as the ways that power in paradigmatic humanitarian contexts, such as refugee camps, is exercised through coercive, disciplinary and bureaucratic measures that reflect indifference and engender hostility.

The original photographs were featured twice in the print version of the Boston Globe with different captions: in the November 7 evening edition (“Firefighter gives breath of life”), and in the November 8 edition, where it was on the front page, under the headline “Life in the Balance.”.

While many initial comments joked about trying to hold back tears upon reading the article, other comments upended the traditional humanitarian narrative of childhood (and savior) innocence by playing on racial and gender stereotypes. Among the comments were: “The story doesn't mention it, but did he hit that?” “In 1968 a white firefighter saved a black baby girl, touching the heart of a divided city. The two did not meet until yesterday … when she swiped his wallet.” “He only saved her because he thought she was a white baby covered in ash.” (http://www.fark.com/comments/4206143/In-1968-a-white-firefighter-saved-a-black-baby-girl-touching-heart-of-a-divided-city-The-two-did-not-meet-again-Until-yesterday).

A common critique of humanitarian narrative is that it tends to be unidirectional in terms of who tells the story and whose lives can be narrated in such stories. Accompanying the truncated narratives are what David Graeber has called “lopsided structures of imagination” that not only reflect inequalities in class and racial status, but also that embody or define how people experience the victim-savior divide [2012]. When Ms. Harper (Anderson) was interviewed on how she felt about reuniting with Carroll after 40 years, she said, “I was very nervous. I said I wonder if he's gonna remember my name. Is he gonna remember these things?”

Salma Hayek was born and raised in Mexico, but it is often noted that she is of Lebanese and Mexican descent. Describing her early attempts to break into Hollywood and gain entry into American film, she has jokingly referred to herself as a “Mexican jumping bean” [Fierman 1999; Mills 1999].

Redfield and Bornstein argue that the abolition movement in the United States involved the rise of a “normative moral sentiment about the human amid violence of market exchange, emphasizing bodily integrity as well as liberty” [Redfield and Bornstein 2011: 16]. This emphasis on bodily integrity through abolitionism is particularly relevant to the Hayek suckling incident, given the U.S. reliance on enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone for rice cultivation in the 19th century. However, these authors also claim that dignity has “come to designate an essential component of human existence, rather than an attribute of reason or character” [ibid.: 20]. As Hayek and Carroll were at no actual health risk through these “transgressions,” these cases represent a hybrid of the concerns that Bornstein and Redfield raise—a risk of bodily dignity.

When I presented an earlier version of this article at Harvard within weeks of these events, a lifelong resident of Boston well into his eighties confided to me, “A white person wouldn't have been caught dead in that neighborhood in that era.” Indeed, the Boston neighborhoods remain racially segregated, and Roxbury is still predominantly black. When the NBC reporter Anne Thompson interviewed Carroll a month later, she asked him, “Back in 1968, did white Irish Catholic guys from Southie mix with African American people from Roxbury?” Carroll replied, “No. I'm gonna be completely honest with you. No.”

It is all the more curious, given the long preoccupation with racial difference in the early 20th century and the subsequent historical analyses of how these differences were narrativized, visualized and operationalized in everyday practice. This may be related to the reluctance to discuss racial thinking, as part of the polite liberal stance I mentioned earlier.

Averting risk for the volunteers has become increasingly central, but it focuses specifically on personal responsibility for managing risk. A fact sheet about the United States Peace Corps notes, “The health, safety, and security of Volunteers is Peace Corps’ highest priority. The agency devotes significant resources to provide Volunteers with the training, support, and information they need to stay healthy and safe.”

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Adia Benton

ADIA BENTON teaches anthropology at Northwestern University, in Evanston. Her book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2015. E-mail: [email protected]