I've been thinking a lot about race and development lately.

Why?

Because most of the people, who seem keen on the idea of development, are well, White of European ancestry.

And most of the people inhabiting the countries that are in need of development are not white.

There are some Southeast Asian players on the scene - Japan International Cooperation Agency or JICA is one notable such organization, but still development is dominated by White people.

What does that mean, exactly?

To be honest, I'm not sure. In my search of the issues I came up with only one article, a 2006 paper by Uma Kothari that really addresses the issue.

It's something of an elephant in the room.

So here is what I know. Race and development is an issue. Many of the countries that are now the targets of international development are nations that were once the target of colonialism, this has created and sustained a type of 'White is Right' dependence mentality.

How this plays out is interesting. An African-American, female friend who spent two years in the Peace Corps, discovered upon arrival in her Senegalese village that she was not welcomed. As both a woman and a person of color they did not see how she would be of value in helping them to achieve their goals. A young, fresh out of undergrad, white male friend, on the other hand, discovered that village elders were often kicked out of their position to make room for him. As a Ghanaian professor with experience representing both African nations and International Governance Organizations pointed out in class once, when the white man shows up to the table, the African tendency is to defer.

It also shows up in a preference for the heads of developing nations to have been educated in Global North institutions. So even if they themselves are not White they have in effect been educated to for a lack of better phrasing 'to think white'.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that there is one way to be Ghanaian or Trinidadian, Filipino or Fijian. I am not saying that by being educated in the Global North, one somehow becomes less Ghanaian or Trinidadian. What I am saying, however, is that hidden in the education of the Global North is a passive current which states that how the Global North (which is predominantly white) thinks is the best way of thinking. This has repercussions, both in a suppression of local knowledge which in many case is better suited to the situation on the ground, and in the attitudes of the often white development workers.

While those in the Global South may be primed to believe/accept the dominance of those in the Global North; the latent superiority that is heavily tied up in race of the Global North means there's a tendency for those in the Global North to believe that they are right.

In other words, some 120 years later after Rudyard Kipling first wrote his poem The White Man's Burden, we are still dealing with those issues.

We're just not talking about it.

And I for one think this is a problem.