An Analysis Of Marx's 'White Savior Mentality'

1a.
White Savior mentality occurs when a white person in power believes that it is their duty to take people of other cultural backgrounds and to make them whiter. This is seen when the tutor Claire is being asked to tutor Juan, a lower class Hispanic child. His parent want to have Juan tutored to learn English. Though Clair has a negative outlook on Juan’s parents, when asked about it she explained that, “they basically hired me, and I told them I would do it for free-they paid me a little bit –but they basically wanted someone else to do it (Marx pg. 59).” Claire is interpreting the parent’s want for a good education for Juan as lazy and uncaring. She believed that it was her duty to help this poor Hispanic boy and that she should help
Many of them are quite shocked at this allegation and offended, since racism is synonymous with being a terrible person. These previous teachers have said on multiple occasions about how terrible racism is and how irrational and how terrible it is. Now they ae becoming that thing that they have hated so much. Though some of the tutors had a different response. The tutor Megan was the only one out of the nine who according to Marx “felt comfortable acknowledging her own racism as an inevitable consequence of living in a racist society.” Out of all of the tutors, Megan meets the idea of being racist with the least bit of hostility. She knows that acknowledging our problems as a racist society, we make it easier for us to have a discussion leading to improvement regarding racism. Megan visualizes racism like a moving walkway in which those who don’t do anything to move against it move towards the same destination racist would be heading towards. By placing no effort in improving their behavior, they move along that path without any
Another thing that Marx encourages is to model a supportive environment for teachers to critically discuss issues of whiteness and racism. The way we can do this is indoctrinating teachers into a world that they can see from multiple cultural perspectives. Which is done through learning about other cultures and learning about how people of other races perceive our world. When new gain this understanding about other people’s cultural backgrounds it lets us reconsider how we see the world. Opening a discussion of racism and whiteness made these previous racist teachers reconsider their outlook on the issues and helped them improve themselves. This is a great thing because, the reality of the world today is that we have been so indoctrinated into this racial society to the point where even when we try our best, we still hold that capacity to enforce racism. So in order to improve this, we need to openly discuss race as much as we can, we need to ask ourselves questions about this; “Are there anyways I’m teaching my classroom unfairly? Do some of my students have any disadvantages? What can I do as a teacher to address these disadvantages?” Questioning ourselves helps us look at our environment and to constantly improve area where there is disadvantage for students. It lets us seek out these problems in our environment so that we may face these issues and overcome