Black children don’t need White teachers who believe that they are saviors. Black children need the system of White supremacy to be annihilated so that problem of structural racism can be addressed definitively. Sadly people are more interested in being domestic missionaries in Black communities than dealing with the system which creates and sustains conditions of oppression. This is, after all, much easier and much less dangerous than confronting White recalcitrance, privilege, and hostility.
To put it more clearly, Black folks are quite capable of solving our problems. We are, unfortunately, beset by a system which has worked in wondrous ways to constrain our capacity. One fine example of this is the assassination of Black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His death is hardly anomalous, but is merely an echo of the global tyranny rained down upon Black leaders who have had the audacity to insist that African/Black land, labor, and resources were theirs to use as they would; that Black folks have, like all other people, a basic right to self-determination. These assassinations were the opening salvo for more destructive campaigns which have effectively crushed movement after movement for self-determination domestically and around the world. It is the height of hypocrisy to revere Dr. King, while failing to recognize the call for radical social transformation that he advocated for when he said, “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”
Again, Black folks don’t need White missionaries. We need liberation, and White folks desirous of “making a difference” should start by dismantling the system that benefits them and hurts us so greatly. Their unwillingness to collectively embrace such a struggle is proportional to their irrelevance to our efforts.