white savior

noun

variants chiefly US white savior or chiefly British white saviour

plural white saviors

1

: a white person who sees themselves as helping or defending people of color but whose actions are patronizing, performative, or intrusive

… ordinary Ugandans are not sitting around waiting for western white saviors to come and "fix" what is wrong with their country, but rather are creatively solving problems …

—Laura Seay

Per [Mikki] Kendall, "That means supporting Black friends and coworkers in their efforts, as well as—when asked—stepping up to do more than cheerlead." (Emphasis on when asked—the white savior complex is a really bad look.)

—Sarah Stiefvater

2

: a white protagonist in a work of fiction in which characters of color are unrealistically portrayed as being unable to succeed without the protagonist's help

Hollywood tends to cast brown characters from the Middle East or Central Asia as seasoned, scary terrorists or helpless victims needing a white savior.

—Arash Azizzada

This is also among the more overt "white savior" stories to hit the screen lately, as it literally is about a white savior who comes from afar and … leads a desert people in revolution against those outsiders who come to take their resources.

—Mark Hughes

… a classic example of the "white savior" narrative, a cinematic trope in which a whiter central character rescues nonwhite characters from some calamitous predicament that the characters of color could not quite overcome on their own.

—Clarence Page

Examples of white savior in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Others are satiric vignettes—pointed takedowns of sham humanitarians, sham foreign journalists, sham white saviors and their sham schemes to save the continent—whose villains can read more like stock inventions than like surprising ones. —Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker, 30 Oct. 2024

The opening scene of A-Train acting opposite Will Ferrell is pretty funny, with director Adam Bourke (the returning P.J. Byrne) insisting that this is not a white savior story. —Ben Rosenstock, Vulture, 13 June 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1964, in the meaning defined at sense 1