Mission Impossible: How Good is Being Good?

Too often, charitable work is more helpful to the privileged than the needy 

By Kylie Heider

Like many other students, my education is subsidized, in part, by scholarships. One of my scholarships stipulates that the student write a thank-you letter to the donor in order to receive the money. Upon learning this, I marvelled at this small injustice: why should I, after years of trying to prove my worth through measures of academia, be required to bow to the feet of these wealthy benefactors, just to receive an award which I had already been granted? Could these people do nothing thankless?

Today, charity exists as a complex moral entanglement. My own loose experience with this conundrum is a highly privileged, minute example of a much broader, more serious issue. In a world of short-term mission trips and white saviors, it is difficult to recognize when philanthropy is genuinely beneficial.  In many ways, mainstream philanthropy—neo-colonial mission trips that fail to aid poverty in developing nations or billionaires donating deceptively huge sums of money to charity when in reality these sums are miniscule percentages of their wealth—are venerated by the general public; those who participate in such efforts are exalted as heroic, courageous examples of the good Samaritan. Of course, it is right to strive to use our privileges—which are often monetary—to uplift others. But when donating efforts begin to tip the scale from productive work in the service of others to self-serving acts to alleviate the guilt of the oppressor, charity begins to fail its noble intent. If the fervor of goodness that is placed on charity was placed equally on efforts to dismantle the systems, which demand such charity—be it poverty or college tuition—perhaps then a tangible change would be made.