The season of love and giving makes me think about “The Mother Teresa Dilemma.” In an age of unbridled hedonism and self-interest, Mother Teresa was a rare person of devotion to her faith and humanity and the world admires and praises her.

But, sociologically and historically viewed in a world of permanent inequality and injustice, such charity merely prolongs the agonies of the poor and powerless. Mother Teresa, and others like her, including the rich men’s so-called philanthropy, all end up perpetuating the existing system of power and injustice. It is like delaying the radical surgery in a desperate patient by Band-Aiding the symptoms.

Poverty exists because wealth exists in uneven distribution, especially in America. The world in which Mother Teresa helped the poor and the sick has so much wealth everywhere, but not where it should be. It is not how much resource there is, but where it is and who hogs it. A tiny top 1% in the U.S., for example, controls virtually all the wealth there is to control.

This is not Mother Teresa’s fault, certainly, and people like her in so many walks of life are doing the best they can to help the needy. Such acts of charity and good, so wonderful on the emotional and personal levels of life, however, merely perpetuate the unjust ownership of wealth and resources and the conditions in which the poor and the sick must endure every day and in perpetuity. In this sense, what Mother Teresa did was to relieve the moment’s pain but to prolong the pain for generations and condemn the poor and sick to their eternal fate with no permanent relief.

One could argue that Band-Aid help is perhaps better than none at all, as most civic helpers believe. But in the long run of history and society where more equally distributed wealth among all is deemed possible and right, no, a Band-Aid doesn’t help. In the meantime, the system of power loves all such charitable acts that relieve the pressure of angry explosions, like revolution, that solve the problem at the fundamental level — for good.

But the likes of Mother Teresa unknowingly prevent such radical acts of social change from exploding. Incremental justice rarely catches up with self-generating injustice.

In America today, the role of Mother Teresa is played by a group of white people called “liberals.” It is these white liberals who, in the best tradition of egalitarian democracy rooted in Jeffersonian idealism, fight for civic justice and racial equality in America.

It’s not easy to be a “good” white person in the richest capitalist country with the world-dominant military. But it’s on the ideas and activities of these white liberals — making up about 20% of white America — that the survival of liberal democracy depends. Individually and together, white liberals represent the best of America as a model for young generations.

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However, their ideas and fights have fatal limits: If you are born white, you grow up white, think white, and live and die white. White skin cannot turn black. Fighting for Black justice as “white” and “liberal” persons in America is indeed a Sisyphean task: You try hard but accomplish little or nothing. The system is many times bigger and stronger than you are.

Like being Black in America, being white is also an indelible mark: No white man, even as a die-hard liberal, has ever become a Black man in his thinking and feeling. You can empathize with Black people, you can lead their civil rights marches, but at the end of the day, you return to your white life in a white neighborhood. And your enlightened criticisms — the only bright spot in America under siege from Trumpian racism — still work as a relief valve through which the worst part of racist pressure escapes, enough to perpetuate the white-dominant equilibrium.

History dictates that all white persons, including the white critics of racism, inevitably benefit from American society’s practice of racism. In a white-supreme society, all whites are supreme. If you are white, you are part of that supremacy whether you are a critic or racist. Eventually, in spite of the great fight they put up for Blacks, white liberals end up being more white than liberal. This unintended dilemma is a great burden these white liberals must carry to their graves, unresolved.

Still, nothing creates a greater sense of relief and hope than seeing vocal and visible critics of racism who are white. But this relief is felt only among whites, whose guilt and torment are relieved by such a sight of white critics who atone for all white men’s guilt and sin. Unwittingly and all in goodwill, white liberals continue to pacify racist issues in the margins and Black people continue to get their angry thunders softened and neutralized by these whites, just like the poor in India constantly nursed to weepy and wimpy gratitude by a tender-hearted angel named Mother Teresa and her latter-day devotees.

With their great numbers in anger, both Blacks in America and the poor in India should demand, not beg, their share of God’s bounties on earth. Their choice of action should be either “do” or “die.” With these liberal interventions, however, it’s neither do nor die, stuck permanently between half dead and half alive.

Only if white liberals would just stay inside their white picket fences and let Blacks carry their cross to its ultimate end — do or die.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus, lives in Greenfield.