How do charity, justice and solidarity relate to CS?

“CHARITY is providing resources that you have available to those who you deem to be in need. It’s supposed to serve immediate needs, even if there’s no assumption that it will produce any kind of long-term change. And so, it doesn’t look to the structural conditions of the problem that’s being addressed, or the power relationship between the people involved. It simply sees a problem and looks to a transfer of resources. And so, it lets people off the hook by not requiring them to recognize their position within a relationship based on power. So, you get to be the good person who’s giving… I think JUSTICE recognizes injustice, and attempts to address it, attempts to reverse or undo the structural conditions that have produced that injustice. That does require a difficult look at who you are and what your role is in imbalanced relationships of power because, from a sociological perspective, that injustice that you’re seeing has always been actively created by human decisions, usually based on an unequal distribution of power and resources. And so, justice would recognize what the injustice is, what the structural conditions are that have produced that, and what the roles of various actors are, including yourself, in terms of creating that injustice, and what power you have that can be used to undo that injustice, even if it’s at a cost to yourself. SOLIDARITY, I think of as mobilizing that imbalance of power to support people who are on the other side, who are on the injustice side of that imbalance of power, but to support them exclusively by listening to their requests and their invitations to be supported.

“… one of the fundamental differences between charity and justice is obligation. And, you know, almost by definition, charitable donations are non-obligatory. And so, when we give something that we consider charity, it means that we have no connection to the underlying causes of the problem that we’re trying to alleviate with that charity. Right? And so, when we do that, the charity makes us feel good about ourselves. Or if you want to go way back to the idea of indulgences in the church, when you give charity, it’s about saving your own soul, right? Maybe we’ve got a modern equivalent of salving my conscience with charity, right? It immediately sets up some kind of disconnect between you and the problem you’re addressing, because that’s why it can be charity. And one of the ways to see that is that if there’s a— kind of a simplistic way, but let’s just take it— if there’s a starving child on the other side of Canada… we wouldn’t see it as charitable to feed that child. Basically, our taxes might go into it, whether it’s welfare payments or something else “might”, whether it’s welfare payments or something else to help feed that child. We wouldn’t see that as a charitable act, we would see that as necessary because that child is part of our “imagined community”, to borrow from Benedict Anderson. But if you take a child who belongs to a different imagined community, suddenly that’s charitable. Right? And, and that’s an interesting division to think about. What do we owe other people in the world? And when we start thinking about… Barry Gil’s writes a forward to a series of journal articles about this topic and talks about two reasons that justice matter. And the one can be reparation. Like we owe people from other parts of the world, say, communities where children are sponsored, we owe something to them, because [of] what the past effects of say colonial or other unjust relationships have caused, or contemporary relations that are unjust, maybe intellectual property rights, or trade regimes that are disproportionately favorable to wealthy countries, something like that, like we owe something because of current situations or the legacy of past situations. Or, we owe something as a kind of fundamental ethical grounds; we want to live in a world where starvation doesn’t exist, and to create that world, that’s actually an ethical obligation on us. Therefore, it can’t ever be charity to feed children in other parts of the world, because it’s actually what we must do as people, depending on what kind of stance you take. And it’s only in a more liberal frame, borrowing from Foucault’s critique, you know, it’s only in a more liberal frame that we don’t see that as an obligation, right? In a communitarian or other framework, we might say, ‘well, that’s an obligation on us. So, it’s not charitable to do these kinds of things’.”

“Even if we do have an inherent sense of… even if it’s a negative sense, if it’s guilt or in a positive sense, it’s we want to make a positive change, …but what we don’t want to do, and it’s very hard for us to be willing to do, is be changed. And that’s the thing that this requires; it requires us to be changed. And in a conversation of global child poverty, for global child poverty to change, it doesn’t require only a simplistic ‘my finances need to change’ or even in another way, ‘[in] my bank statements, I have a certain amount that’s allotted to something and I’ll give that away and I will feel like I’m doing something good.’  That’s not what it requires. It actually requires us to change. It requires behavioral change, and our behavioral change should also cause a greater degree of financial change and sacrifice on our parts. But it takes so much for us to be willing to get up off our butts to actually be willing to be changed, that almost nobody wants to do that. And so instead, it just continues to perpetuate the cycle of like, ‘Well, okay, all that I’m going to receive is something that’s not really going to change me. But I do want to feel good;’ so, it’s going to be marketed to me as an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Creating the ‘other’ has to continue to be a thing, because if I don’t see them as an ‘other’, then I have to deal with that. And if I deal with that, then I’m going to have to be changed. And I really don’t want to be changed, I’d rather just do something.”

“The other aspect of that is, we often think— and this is my kind of book, is how it affects sponsors and the discourse of development within North America—well, how does it affect children who are sponsored, not on a practical level, but on some other level, and there’s some research that gets to this, but, you know, if you’re seen to be… the object of charity, “charity,” what does that do for you? And we know already, there’s tons of good research on being the object of charity in inner city United States or being the object of charity, like it’s a very paternalistic, condescending, [it] leaves objects with very little agency, right? How do they feel about being the object of this northern charity? Especially when they have this false connection?

I’ll leave you with one other kind of anecdote. It’s a well-known secret that child sponsorship… children who are sponsored do not know who sponsors them. They can’t know. In fact, the information is literally redacted from letters to children. And if you think about it for a moment, of course, that has to be the case, because what has happened in the past, is that people close to children have written letters directly to sponsors, asking for more money, saying, ‘oh, the child needs to x’, right? And so, child sponsorship agencies protect sponsors, by hiding their identity. But I challenge you to find a sponsor who knows that and is okay with that… It shows that it’s a fundamentally unidirectional relationship. And [that’s going] beyond the fact that many of these letters are form letters, right? Where the child fills in the blanks, even if it’s sometimes written by a sponsorship agency employee, who’s paid with program fees, to write the letter for the child. Not that the child’s never involved. But the handwriting might be from someone else, right there’s cases of this. So, there’s this lack of a direct relationship.”