Exploring anti-racist narratives: issues and opportunities
Channel: IIED
Date: 2023-05-31

Many of the narratives used in international development and humanitarian work are clichéd and harmful, depicting communities across majority Black and Brown countries as poor, helpless, and homogenous groups.

At the same time, they often represent White overseas aid workers as liberators, rescuers and leaders, promoting White-led Western organisations as the solution to global poverty, replicating discriminatory stereotypes in new ways.

At their root, these narratives oversimplify economic, political and social dynamics and fail to name the ways that modern structural racism and the colonial legacies of oppression and exploitation cause global patterns of wealth and poverty, which in turn shape ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions to the challenges we focus on. 

In this presentation, Natalie Lartey, advocacy and engagement manager at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), explores how we can re-imagine or change these narratives, looking at widespread sector reform of internal discourse, and external communication, and examines work IIED has been doing in this area.

This presentation is from a seminar organised by Sida and IIED.

More information: https://www.iied.org/iied-short-seminars-challenges-for-post-covid-19-world

#decolonisation #racism