How does a charity with a bad reputation and falling donations change its image?
Oxfam’s got the answer: call your staff racist
In Britain, Oxfam is best known for its high-street charity shops that sell overpriced second-hand clothes. In Haiti, it’s a very different story. There, Oxfam is most associated with serious sexual misconduct.
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that claimed 220,000 lives, injured 300,000 and left 1.5 million people destitute, male aid workers brought girls, some reported to be below the age of consent, to their Oxfam-funded accommodation for parties described as being “like a Caligula orgy with prostitutes in Oxfam T-shirts.”
Oxfam is now keen to rehabilitate its image by condemning its own employees. It would indeed make sense to expose and condemn the corrupt managers of its foreign aid programmes. But this is not what the charity has in mind. Instead, Oxfam’s British executive team has circulated a survey to shop workers, office staff, drivers and factory hands, asking them about their attitudes towards racial justice. The starting point for the survey is that “whiteness” is “the overarching preservation of power and domination for the benefit of white people”. In other words, “whiteness” is inherently racist. Being white is bad.