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7 Oct 2014

Global South Launches ‘Best White Saviour’ Award

From Bono to Al Gore, there can be no doubt that white saviours are great. Sadly the Global South has done little to acknowledge the greatness of white people over the recent decades, claiming it was busy with the challenges of post-colonisation, nation-building and fending off hunger. These are poor excuses however and a wide coalition of Global South governments, NGOs and ordinary people are now attempting to rectify this historic omission by launching the ‘Best White Saviour’ award this year.


The award will be similar to the Nobel Prize, which is normally handed to Distinguished White People or Non-threatening Brown People occasionally, but will be exclusively awarded to the great and the good among white people. The award will aim to celebrate white saviours’ celebration of their importance to the world and their contributions to the rest of us, and will come up with a modest financial prize and an ethically-sourced trophy in keeping with white saviour culture and high self-regard.


From white governments that prevent brown people from immigrating to preserve their connection with their homelands and protect them from being corrupted by Western lifestyle to white environmentalists who want to shield brown people from the inconveniences of electricity, sanitation and cars, to white celebrities who will bravely talk with very little understanding about complex political questions, to white charities and NGOs that will speak on behalf of millions of brown people so they don’t have to go through the excruciating process of forming opinions, these and many more are huge contributions that white saviours continue to provide consistently yet the Global South has failed to recognise or reward them properly. The ‘Best White Saviour’ is a timely attempt at putting things right.

The criteria for the award are diverse and extensive, focusing primarily on white saviours who are not afraid or reluctant to celebrate their own achievements, sometimes pre-emptively. Ordinary white people who work as nurses and teachers who might contribute to charity or volunteer to help others will be ineligible for the award, seeing as they go about this anonymously and without creating the much-needed buzz that is a cornerstone of the philosophy of ‘raising awareness’ which is quite important to white saviour culture for reasons we don’t quite understand, but who are we to judge.

Instead the award will aim to celebrate big names in the white saviour community and reward their passion for self-glorification and making sure the media is aware of every little thing they do to help others, particularly photogenically-destitute Global Southerners. The award will also aim to consolidate the waves of spontaneous grovelling among a minority of trailblazers in the South towards white celebrities that ‘speak on their behalf’. The feeling here is this has been done in a piecemeal way so far and it needs to be properly organised with a trophy and everything.

Some of the candidates being considered for the award in its crucial first year are Al Gore for his tireless campaigning for his own place in history, the European Union for its dedication to celebrating its benign and inoffensive values, Naomi Klein for being so right on all the time albeit in a patronising manner, Jeffrey Sachs for his heroic attempt at disproving the theory that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Russell Brand for being so sexy and compassionate. Bono is being considered for a Lifetime Achievement Award for services to White Savioureness.



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Karl reMarks is a blog about Middle East politics and culture with a healthy dose of satire.

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