The whites about whom Alain Locke writes in "The New Negro," who view blacks as objects to be helped and managed but not to be viewed as fully developed human beings who should aspire to psychological and material independence from them. 

The white husband of the female protagonist in LeRoi Jones The Slave, who seems to be interested in blacks' progress until he realizes that it means an alteration in his and other whites' personal status and security.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, in James Baldwin view in "Everybody's Protest Novel," who was a sloppy sentimentalist in her kindly view of blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin. (According to Baldwin, sentimentality, by definition, is an exaggerated display of artificial emotion which is an attempt to sublimate the sentimentalist's actual hostility and disdain for the objects of his or her false sympathy. Stowe's good intentions were undermined by her complete failure to see blacks as humans of any complexity but as mere objects to be categorized and contorted into semihumans.)

Mr. Norton, the white Bostonian benefactor of a black college, in Ralph Ellison Invisible Man, who sees the college as a way of molding blacks into what he wants them to be and is terrified by blacks beyond his control, as is shown in his near nervous breakdown when he hears Jim Trueblood tell his tale of incest. (Beyond blacks civilized by him, Norton seems to think, is unthinkable chaos.)

Mr. Ostrowski, the schoolteacher in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, who seems to think it is benevolent to snatch young Malcolm's dreams of being a lawyer from him--it is only realistic for blacks to aspire to menial employment.

The benefactor in James Weldon Johnson The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, who also seems to think that it is benevolent to tear the title character's dreams of being part of black culture and helping to advance it, seemingly on the pretext that the soon-to-be-ex-colored man is too refined to be subjected to the indignities blacks suffer and should not align himself with other blacks. (Again, a white person's good intentions take the form of identity control over a black person.)

Mrs. Dalton in Native Son, who wants Bigger to be educated, he feels, not because she really cares even to know his desires, but simply because she wants to impose her view of what is good fog Bigger on him--with no care to know his hopes and dreams. (Mary, her radical daughter, and Jan, Mary's Communist boyfriend, also want to direct how Bigger should think and act; they seem to think, "You must act like my equal and be my friend--whether you like it or not." Bigger's discomfort with these seemingly progressive whites conveys Wright's belief in the alienation many blacks feel at being the targets of insensitive, unempathic, and manipulative liberalism.)

Ann and Michael, the young white couple living in New York during the Harlem Renaissance in Langston Hughes "Slave on the Block", whose desire to control blacks even as they feel that they like them is symbolized by their hiring a young black man, Luther, to pose for a picture which they mean to capture the essence of blacks: wonderful innocents. ( Hughes shows that the couple is fascinated by blacks but never befriended by them. The equality of true social interaction is precluded by the control that the couple wants to have over the objects of their fascination. Thus, in this case, as in others, liberals are shown to be people who have deluded themselves into thinking that they are enlightened--when what they really want is to be guardians or keepers of blacks.)