At a time when Islamophobia is plumbing new lows, an Instagram account that attempts to undo the “darker” racist practices in a “light”-hearted manner seems a bit out of context and a wee bit too late.
A couple of twenty-something women, who choose to remain anonymous, have a dedicated Instagram account called Barbie Savior, to lampoon the white-man complex.
If you’re unfamiliar, the term is used to describe the white Westerners who travel to third world countries and make the entire affair an exercise in self-congratulatory #sacrifice.
The word is a derivative of Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden”, a term that he coined to highlight the outrageous work done by the colonisers in the knowledgeably darker nations.
The Barbie Savior borrows the motif of Barbie from the now defunct Socality Barbie’s Instagram account. Socality Barbie poked fun at the hipster Instagram accounts of people who were perennially on a virtual octane rush.
The owners of Barbie Savior were once guilty of practising the “white man complex” themselves. “We were never as ‘savioresque’ as Barbie Savior, but we did things back in our White Savior days that we regret,” the creators told The Huffington Post.
Unfortunately, the owners of the account espouse a very reductive definition of the white man’s burden. The centuries of oppression both physical and ideological which is still perpetrated via language and racist slurs cannot be wiped off with a bunch of instagrammed pictures of the problematic barbie.
Barbie is an embodiment of all that the Orient is not: white, blonde, blue-eyed. As a result, the account unwittingly reinstates the stereotypes that it sought to dismiss.
Good attempt but a bad character choice.
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