From white savior + -ism.
white saviorism (uncountable)
- The worldview that regards white people as saviors and other groups as needing to be saved by them.
1994 May 4, D TUng, “JOY LUCK CLUB: and Asian Women”, in soc.culture.asian.american[1] (Usenet):These strike me as pretty apparent examples of White savior mentality. Perhaps I'm being a bit sensitive about this. I admit that the Chao charcters link to white saviorism is a bit weak, but when this is coupled the character change of Harold Livotny to Harold (fill in asian name here).
2015, Keith M. Sturges, editor, Neoliberalizing Educational Reform, →ISBN, page 117:White saviorism is a form of false generosity; it maintains and embodies white supremacy; it frames the white outsider as the savior and hero and the people of color as too oppressed, too downtrodden, too powerless to help themselves.
2016, Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White[2], NYU Press, →ISBN:White saviorism reinforces the goodness of whites by arguing that whites must lift up the Other from their state of savagery. […] In these cases, white saviorism seeks to rescue communities of color from themselves and their nonwhiteness.
