Future of Good issued a call for personal essay submissions about racism in social impact work — this piece was submitted in response. This is an expanded reflection on the experiences shared in “At The Nexus Of Belonging And ‘Othering’: Reflections From A Racialized International Development Worker”

Before being deployed to the field, it is standard for international development workers to receive training and orientation to their deployment. Typically included in this training is education on understanding social location as an international development worker – understanding how your identity dictates the way that people relate to you, how you relate to people, and why this should be taken into consideration to avoid reinforcing neo-colonial relationships between NGOs and client communities. Trainings of this nature draw upon previous ‘lessons learned’ in the field of international development – how to avoid visibly reinforcing neo-colonial ties, how to locate your privilege and avoid speaking for or on behalf of communities you don’t belong to, how to ensure that interventions are created by client communities and not created for client communities. At the centre of these cultural sensitivity training modules is the universal understanding that the international development worker is inherently privileged over the client by way of race, class, wealth, and education.

For the most part, this is true. Being able to engage in international development work as an expatriate is, in and of itself, a mark of privilege. Having a passport to travel internationally, having command of a language that is universal enough to work in multiple contexts (such as English), having the ability to put your life and responsibilities in your country of origin on ‘hold’ for long enough to embark on a foreign mission are all indicators of privilege. And, for the most part, positions in international development are mainly occupied by white, rich, upper-class people.

International development does have a race problem. Many international development organizations have adopted an ineffective ‘colour-blind’ approach to their work, refusing to engage in conversations about how racism affects the programs they implement in racialized, vulnerable communities and how this is reflected within the hierarchies of international development organizations. Unfortunately, this filters down to the grassroots level: what is missed by much of the training offered is that the previous reality of international development workers only being white and rich is no longer universal. This new generation of racialized, diversified employees bring many opportunities, but also carry with them the challenge of being both someone with privilege, and in many other ways, someone without.

I have existed in the field of equity, diversity, and inclusion my whole life by virtue of my identity. As a Muslim woman of colour, the daughter of immigrants, and a member of a persecuted minority group in Sri Lanka, my family’s country of origin, I hold multiple identities and privileges that shape and influence the way that I approach my work. And while cultural sensitivity training is useful and speaks to the areas of privilege I do have – my education, my language, my nationality – the resources that are even available to draw upon for cultural sensitivity programming are not sparking conversations about what it means to be a racialized person in international development work, particularly one that holds multiple intersections of identity.

People of colour in this field sit between this strange space of existing as an international development worker who is able to engage in developing and implementing effective interventions alongside communities that are vulnerable, while simultaneously belonging to the communities that are hosts of our interventions. Engaging in international development work as a racialized person is like looking in a mirror; we see ourselves reflected back in the faces of clients. 

My international development worker experience stems from two stints in Jordan. As someone whose visible identity has always ‘othered’ me in Canada, living in Jordan was a novel experience. Despite being born and raised in Canada, I have often found myself having to defend my belonging (questions such as “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” are good examples of this.) But then in Jordan, as a Muslim woman of colour, I was not asked to justify my belonging. For perhaps what was the first time in my entire life, I simply was, and there was no further explanation required.

In my master’s program, one of our required readings was Bonnie Honig’s Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Honig talks about how each government and state is built around the concept of ‘public things’, things that individuals who identify as part of the collective state are able to access by virtue of their belonging. While Honig raises this as a way to highlight the inequalities faced by undocumented or migrant populations, who struggle to access ‘public’ things in the same way their counterparts do, the lesson struck a deeper chord for me. As a visible minority in multiple, intersectional facets, I, too, struggle to access ‘public things’ in Canada: walking down the street, my belonging in this country is questioned. But, in Jordan, despite not being Arab, not speaking Arabic, not having been raised in the culture, I was accepted in a way that I never was at ‘home’. 

This ability to move in and out of cultures is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I have the opportunity to engage in conversations and be present in spaces that my peers may not be able to. This is due, in part, to the fact that I can understand, to some extent, the social and cultural realities on the ground because they so closely echo my lived experience. On the other hand, I have the ability to insert and remove myself from the narrative as I please, and do not have to deal with the reality of the situations that clients face. For example, when COVID-19 impacted Jordan in March 2020, I left Jordan for Canada. While I was grateful to be home, with reliable and free healthcare access, close to family, and able to understand the infrastructure that was implemented to mitigate COVID-19, I recognize that most people do not have the luxury to leave in the face of a pandemic for a relatively ‘safer’ situation. For me, despite my perceived belonging to this context, this safety net was always available – almost exclusively – to me and other Canadians like me.

Consciously or not, intentionally or not, I exist in this nexus between two worlds: the country I was born and raised in, where I cannot walk freely through communities as someone who belongs by default, and the countries in which I am considered to visibly ‘belong’ by virtue of my ethnic ambiguity, but where I will never wholly fit in. While this provides me the opportunity to engage in communities in a unique way that my white counterparts may never experience, it also presents a set of unique and misunderstood challenges in spaces that have historically never been touched by international development workers. Diversifying cultural sensitivity training to honour and acknowledge the intersections at which racialized people exist within the international development world will be crucial to effectively supporting and celebrating client communities in a more intimate way than before, and also maintaining the safety and honouring the emotional labour with which systemically underrepresented international development workers engage in this space.

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