The Thing About Feed My Starving Children Is

I'm looking at Feed My Starving Children's website, and asking the question "why aren't any of the children in these photos, that FMSC is serving, white?"

I’d attach some links here, but really just go to the FMSC website and it’s not possible to find a picture of a white child getting Manna Packs.

I'm just scratching the surface of my anti-racist journey, so my words are going to be eating shit and there will be many missteps, but I don't believe I'll ever be at a point when I can speak about or understand race without tripping or putting my foot in my mouth or both. I've had 31 years of white-centered conditioning, going through life with the understand that there is no difference between the white experience and the universal human experience. So I’m pushing forward despite how horribly ignorant this is going to sound. And facing these demons that say ‘what are you thinking! Things on the internet are forever! In 20 years you’ll wish you’d kept your mouth shut!’.

Seeing white is a challenge right now. Not because it's hard to find, but coming to terms with the immense, heavy, all-fucking-everywhere-and-completely-ignored oppression of a homogenous culture is overwhelming. As someone who benefits from it. But feeling guilt or shame—while it is a natural stage of coming to terms with how much silencing I have been ignorant of and complicit in—is not productive. It is not helpful. And if I sit in that space, it is indulgent and protective (thank you Robin DiAngelo for that awareness).

So I'm holding space.

But it’s everywhere. Whiteness. Everywhere. Everything we think has ‘nothing to do with race’ is basically the white person’s point of view. Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s what it feels like.

And back to this question. Why aren't any of these kids white? Because white settler culture is so effective that only the people that are living in such extreme poverty are black or brown? Because FMSC made a conscious decision not to serve white folks in extreme poverty because it doesn't have the same effect in photos?

I don't know the answer. I'm just sitting with those questions.

And feeling some kind of irony that we (we being white settler culture) take land and resources away from people of color, and then once they're dying from the lack of resources, we swoop in and, with all the pity we can muster, Save them from their ‘'horrible unthinkable conditions’. Without once wondering just how the heck those conditions came to be in the first place.

Also, I've had a lifelong battle understanding irony so that could be a totally incorrect use of irony. But something is off about the whole situation. How is it that we get to be the hero at the end of the day?