White savior

The term white savior is a critical description of a white person depicted as liberating, rescuing or uplifting non-white people; it is critical in the sense that it describes a pattern in which people of color in economically under-developed nations that are majority non-white are denied agency and are seen as passive recipients of white benevolence. The role is a modern-day version of "The White Man's Burden", a poem by Rudyard Kipling from 1899. The term has been associated with Africa, and certain characters in film and television have been critiqued as white savior figures. Writer Teju Cole combined the term with "industrial complex" (derived from military–industrial complex and similarly applied elsewhere) to coin "White Savior Industrial Complex". Feminist and postcolonial scholars also argue that the trope is deeply gendered and classed, often centering white women’s humanitarianism as rescuing “Third World women” while obscuring local agency and structural causes.