Journalists too often depend on aid workers — for transportation, lodging, food, and companionship as well as information — and Polman worries that they come away with a distorted view of natives as people who merely suffer or inflict suffering, and of white humanitarians as their only hope.
The white trucks of humanitarian aid rumbled through Russia in a convoy stretching for miles, moving slowly southwards on the M4 highway, amid a landscape of fertile fields and Ladas stopped at the roadside – their boots overflowing with watermelons for sale.
Clean, efficient, humanitarian.
A warehouse in a U.N. compound in Gaza that came under Israeli fire on Thursday was apparently hit by white-phosphorus shells, U.N. humanitarian affairs chief John Holmes said.
The humanitarians, in their white vans, will come.' " The evacuation of the southern basin took place just before the harvest, so Boko Haram collected whatever millet, wheat, and maize the islanders had left behind.
However, justifications for intervention must now be done on universal, "humanitarian" grounds instead of the "white man's burden".
As a teenage trumpet prodigy, he toured with Lionel Hampton's band before becoming a composer, record producer, film and TV producer, arranger, conductor, the first black executive in a white-owned record company, magazine founder and humanitarian.
"They can't see the meetings, they don't see the World Humanitarian Summit, they just see the white trucks that blaze into camp and then blaze back out again," Dunn says.
Nothing spoils the mood, contaminates one's pure African humanitarian experience faster than seeing another white face.
Folsom operated out of a sense of noblesse oblige: privileged whites, he believed, ought to "adopt a more humanitarian attitude" toward blacks.
