Education Quote by Russell Banks

Banks is doing something more unsettling than “calling out” a demographic pattern. He’s catching the reader mid-romance: the comforting story that sanctuary work is pure compassion, outside politics, outside class. By stacking blunt declarative sentences - “They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated” - he mimics the clinical tone of field notes, but the target isn’t the apes. It’s the humans who want to believe their care is neutral.

The opener, “First of all,” signals argument, even impatience. It frames what follows as an inconvenient baseline fact people keep skipping past. The gendered observation (“usually women”) is not a pat on the back; it’s a clue about how caregiving gets socially assigned, then quietly devalued or rendered invisible as labor. “Rarely men” lands like an accusation and a sociological shrug at once: power tends to show up at the funding table, not in the enclosure.

Then Banks tightens the screw with race and class. “White,” “privileged,” “educated” are not character judgments so much as coordinates. Sanctuaries, in this framing, become institutions where moral authority is produced - and where certain kinds of people can afford to perform virtue full-time, often on land, with legal access, donor networks, and the right accent of legitimacy. The subtext is that compassion can be sincere and still reproduce hierarchies: who gets to “save” animals, whose suffering counts as globally visible, whose labor is framed as noble, and whose is dismissed as mere survival.

Contextually, this reads like Banks at his best: humanism with teeth. He’s less interested in the primates than in the colonial aftertaste of rescue itself.