Strictly Stacey’s fury at ‘white saviour’ row MP
... and guess what, HE turned down offer of Africa trip for Comic Relief
STACEY Dooley became embroiled in an extraordinary spat with a Labour MP yesterday in the ongoing controversy over her Comic Relief trip to Uganda.
The Strictly Come Dancing star was accused of ‘poverty porn’ and acting like a ‘white saviour’ after posting pictures of herself on Instagram holding an African child while filming for the charity appeal earlier this week.
MP David Lammy has now joined in the chorus of disapproval, accusing Miss Dooley of using social media ‘to look like a heroine saving “victim” black children’.
He added on Twitter: ‘The world does not need any more white saviours. This just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes.’
Documentary maker Miss Dooley, 31, hit back online, saying: ‘David, is the issue with me being white? (Genuine question) ... because if that’s the case, you could always go over there and try raise awareness?
‘Comic Relief have raised over £1billion since they started. I saw projects that were saving lives with the money. Kids lives.’
The row then took another twist when Comic Relief revealed in a tweet they had asked Mr Lammy to travel to Africa with the charity, but he had declined. It said: ‘We have previously asked David Lammy if he would like to work with us to make a film in Africa and he has not responded. The offer is still open.’
The MP dismissed claims he had not responded, but said he turned the charity down after two meetings because he was ‘not prepared to become part of a PR exercise’.
He added: I had hoped – and still hope – your coverage would improve but Stacey’s post was more of the same tired tropes.’
In his reply to Miss Dooley, he stressed his criticism ‘wasn’t personal’ but said: ‘My problem is with British celebrities being flown out by Comic Relief to make these films is that it sends a distorted image of Africa which perpetuates an old idea from the colonial era.’
The Tottenham MP accused Comic Relief of portraying Afri- cans as ‘helpless victims to be pitied’. He added: ‘Many black Brits feel deeply uncomfortable with Comic Relief’s poverty porn.
‘Stacey’s Instagram posts continue a very long established trope of white female heroine with orphan black child with little or no agency or parents in sight. Comic Relief do this because it makes people give money.’
Mr Lammy later ramped up his criticism in two TV appearances.
When asked on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show about Miss Dooley’s ‘is the issue with me being white?’ comment, he said: ‘That suggests that she doesn’t understand the issues.
‘That’s part of the problem. Despite the fact she has power and agency she’s not sought to educate herself about the issues.’ He added: ‘Her Instagram conveys the age-old trope that is her as the heroine and the black child as the victim and we have to stop it.
‘The image is a perpetual image of people who are impoverished, who need white celebrities. It keeps the continent of Africa poor. It keeps people in their place’. Mr Lammy told ITV’s This Morning that Comic Relief ‘wanted me to be part of their PR machine and I’m not prepared to do that’.
He said: ‘I’m not a filmmaker, there are thousands of African filmmakers, thousands of African celebrities. They don’t need me. You could have some Africans talking about their country, you could go to African comedians.
‘Unfortunately Stacey has run into the same criticism Ed Sheeran had a few years ago, and Madonna when she went over to Africa.’
Comic Relief has come under fire before for appearing to promote ‘white saviourism’ – a term used to describe white people who help poor non-whites in a way which could be seen as self-serving.
Last year the charity vowed to stop using celebrities to push their message, after singer Ed Sheeran attracted flak over a 2017 filming trip to Liberia in which he offered to put up street children in a hotel for a few days.
Miss Dooley earlier defended herself against the criticism of her Instagram photos, saying: ‘The Ugandan families asked to take pictures with us. The suggestion that I would stroll up to a child I don’t know and would force them to have a selfie is ridiculous.
‘I’ve been working in Africa for nearly 12 years, I ask the locals how I should behave. None of them here are upset with this photo.’
Miss Dooley – whose Uganda documentary on malaria and neonatal clinics is due to be shown on Red Nose Day, March 15 – has become known for her hard-hitting documentaries Stacey Dooley Investigates on BBC Three.
The internet-only channel yesterday announced she has been commissioned to make two new documentaries on the international arms trade and bounty hunters.
A Comic Relief spokesman said: ‘We are really grateful Stacey Dooley, an award-winning documentary maker, agreed to go to Uganda to discover more about projects the British people have funded there and make no apologies for this.’
‘Distorted image of helpless victims’
David Lammy is not happy about Stacey dooley’s Comic Relief trip to africa. Bad enough, his argument goes, that she swanned out there in the first place, trying to make a charity documentary and put some good in the world. Who does she think she is? a worthy person? Bah.
The Labour politician is enraged about something he calls ‘white saviour’ complex and has accused dooley of using her instagram account to make herself look like a ‘heroine’ trying to save ‘victim’ black children. While i don’t agree with his bigger argument about celebrities propounding what he calls hateful colonial imagery — privileged whites indulging themselves by tossing a crumb to oppressed blacks — hasn’t he got a point about her social media posts?
dooley’s instagram photographs from the Ugandan village where she was reporting on neonatal clinics and malaria have a queasy air about them. i’m sorry, but they do. Here is the 31-year- old television reporter and Strictly Come dancing star clutching a cute black baby, who looks none too pleased with the encounter.
Here she is again with the same toddler, head thrown back, laughing: hers, not his. He still looks a bit fed-up.
and has she applied a postproduction vanity filter to make her eyes so blue, her skin so clear and her teeth so bright?
Since that would be so ghastly and inappropriate, such a glutinous splotch of first-world narcissism in the middle of this dusty safari of poverty, i’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and presume she hasn’t.
Her other snaps include one of a little shack, presumably where the locals live or work.
and look here, another picture of indigenous women dancing and laughing, wearing colourful traditional robes. aren’t they just david Lammy is preposterous in
a thousand ways and Stacey Dooley is terrific in a hundred ways more, but to be honest, some of this unseemly row is her own doing.
Although she is not to blame for the social media self-obsession that currently engulfs society, perhaps she could have done more to encourage her 669,000 Instagram followers to understand and appreciate the gravity of her African trip.
BESIDE her photograph of the humble shack, a fan called Jackie has joked that it is ‘ the Strictly dressing room’, followed by a thumbs-up emoji.
Next to the photograph of the random child — whom she never gives the dignity of a name — Dooley herself has written ‘OB.SESSSSSSSSSSED.’
Isn’t that peculiar? It suggests th that this poor unfortunate boy, bo born into grinding hardship in on one of the poorest countries in th the world, is something desirable to obsess over, like a puppy or a new handbag or covetable pair of shoes.
That is before she sets him back d down in the sub-Saharan dust a and returns home to her glamorous o life in the UK, of course. To make matters worse, Dooley’s African images were sandwiched between the cheery clatter of her u usual Instagram feed.
Stacey posing for magazine photoshoots, Stacey drinking pink cocktails with her friends, Stacey pausing by a mirror to admire her matching accessories. It insinuated that her Ugandan trip had been just one more pit stop on the carousel of her lovely life.
A heroine? Well as anyone on Instagram will tell you, it is all about me, me, me.
Anyone like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Clarkson and Nigella. To be honest, I regularly check into their Instagram to find out what they and everyone else are doing — and am never disappointed.
Gwyneth has just helped actress Drew Barrymore celebrate her birthday, and takes time to praises her ‘immense brain’.
Jeremy is on holiday with his girlfriend in Vietnam and spent the morning picking up litter from the beach. Nigella has just finished a trip to Australia, where she ate a lot of gingered tuna.
Meanwhile, are any of my enemies with Insta accounts in trouble or in pain? Let’s hope it is nothing trivial. These are the questions I ask myself while pouring a glass of rosé and happily scrolling through the not-so-secret lives of others, patrolling the very depths of their shallows.
I don’t post myself because I’m too busy wondering when and why everyone become so ‘OB.SeSSeD’ with putting the minutiae of their lives out there, for nosy parkers like me to consume as if they were episodes in a soap opera.
EVEN though a great number of celebrities are slyly marketing themselves rather than guilelessly sharing their lives, the concept of privacy and a real sense of self are beginning to be washed away in this ongoing sea of conceit.
And of course all this filters down into the ‘civilian’ population. even children now film themselves doing many everyday things — for if you don’t record it and post about it, how can it possibly exist?
Of course, the weird culture of Instagram and other social media platforms is not unique to Stacey Dooley.
Millions use these sites to post the significant alongside the trivial, the profound together with the profane.
Perhaps she meant well, posing in the wretched village with the unknown little boy in her arms. Perhaps she thought there would be some benefit to posting the image online.
Yet it is hard to see what that benefit could be, except to burnish the halo and image of one Stacey Dooley.
And unfortunately, David Lammy agrees with me.