This period in New Orleans crystallized the idea of the savior for me. It is not just about Brandon Darby but also about the people who followed him. Darby is not so much a prototypical savior as he is the kind of dangerous person who can rise to power when we are seeking saviors. Tens of thousands of people came to New Orleans to save the city, and too many were uninterested in listening or learning. I heard again and again, “There was no organizing here before we came here.” Or, “We’re going to teach the people here about resistance.” A city with hundreds of years of history of resistance to white supremacy faced the indignity of being “taught” how to organize by an endless stream of privileged white twenty-year-olds.
In the first two years, for many who had come to New Orleans to save the city and its people, Darby was like a cult leader. Young volunteers would hang on his every word. He always seemed to be dating several beautiful, idealistic, college-aged activist women. With Darby’s example, post-Katrina relief was almost a contest of machismo: who could gut houses faster, stay longer in housing without electricity and running water, stand up to police, and lead the Black masses to justice? Scholar Rachel Luft, who worked to support feminist and antiracist responses among volunteers, described this attitude as disaster masculinity.4
When the city released a planning blueprint that called for the flooded Lower Ninth Ward to be bulldozed and left as a green space, Darby moved into an empty house in the neighborhood and announced that he was going to stay there to represent all the residents who had been displaced, standing against demolitions until the rightful owners could return. “If I’d had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people,” he said later, declaring that he’d bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: “There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents.”5
In a time when most New Orleanians were displaced, Darby’s leadership position in Common Ground gave him a platform for media attention. There was a story on Nightline; Academy Award–winning director Jonathan Demme filmed a profile of him; he was featured on the Tavis Smiley Show, in documentaries, and on local and international TV and radio. Although Darby had no roots in the city or experience, he had rushed into a vacuum and became an internationally known voice of New Orleans. The influx of Common Ground volunteers, many of whom brought media connections from around the United States, helped Darby to grab the spotlight. He took advantage of journalists not up for doing the work to find the authentic voices of the affected communities of New Orleans. Everyone seemed to be enamored by the story of the charismatic white savior.
Darby represented what I think of as the classic tendency of the savior, a sort of leftist version of Manifest Destiny, where a person acts as if he is destined to lead the struggle of poor people, who implicitly are unqualified to lead their own struggle. Darby was always leading in their name. “I don’t think I want to be a hero any more than someone who’s a firefighter. Are they firefighters because they want to be [heroes]?” Darby later asked a reporter. “Some people are really good with numbers, and they’re accountants. My brain thinks of ways to fix things I think are wrong.”6
Darby was a polarizing figure from the beginning. Many New Orleans organizers were convinced by his disruptive presence that Darby was paid by the federal government to bring dissent to the movement. Even Malik Rahim’s own son was suspicious. “It came to the degree that my son just knew that there was something too wrong with Brandon, and he searched Brandon’s possessions, because he said, ‘This guy is an agent, or he is an informant,’” Rahim said later. “And, let me tell you, it caused a rift between my son and I, so much so that eventually, he left. Because I believed Brandon. I defended him.”7
These concerns were well-founded. Rahim lived through COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which utilized agents and informants to spy on and sabotage movements from 1956 though the operation’s exposure in 1971.8 The FBI’s paid informant program has grown dramatically since the days of COINTELPRO, with the number of informants rising from 1,500 in 1975 to 15,000 in 2011. While COINTELPRO focused on the civil rights and Black power movements, today the FBI uses undercover agents and paid informants in a range of movements, with the majority apparently focused on Muslim communities. From 2001 to 2011, almost half of all terrorism prosecutions involved the use of a paid informant.9 In many of these cases, lawyers and advocates have found that the so-called “terrorists” were confused young men, often with mental disabilities, limited intelligence, emotional problems, or desperate life situations who were manipulated by the informant into agreeing to actions they had previously shown no interest in.10
By this time, Darby was already having conversations with the police. In December 2005 he told a reporter that he had “the New Orleans Police Department’s hierarchy on speed dial” and had regular meetings with police.11 Local organizers condemned his provocative behavior, but his leadership position in Common Ground shielded him from accountability.
In the tense post-Katrina era, Darby seemed to be encouraging conflict between different activists and organizations doing reconstruction work. When organizers from the local chapter of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence announced that they were opening a women’s health clinic, Darby announced his own clinic, and with his higher profile was able to secure funding that might otherwise have gone to the local, women of color–led effort.
Darby’s friend crow (in an action he later said Darby pushed him to take) wrote a brutal letter attacking People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, a coalition of Black-led organizations active in the city, further causing conflict among local organizers. Lily Keber, one of the many new arrivals to New Orleans who dated Darby in 2006, told me that even when Darby was in a bar, “there would always be fights near him. He would never be in the fight, but it was always between two people he had just been talking to.”
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a touchstone in social justice history in this country. Tens of thousands of volunteers came to help rebuild the city. In one month, during spring break 2006, about two thousand five hundred volunteers passed through Common Ground, most of them staying in a gutted schoolhouse in the Upper Ninth Ward and washing in outdoor showers. When volunteers saw the devastation in mostly Black areas, while white areas were receiving aid and recovering quickly, and when they saw Black-led organized resistance to this unequal recovery, it was a transformative, inspiring experience. Like the protests in Ferguson nearly ten years later, it was a moment of awakening that spread virally across the United States.
But there were also problems in that gutted schoolhouse: an epidemic of sexual assault, committed by young white males against female and transgender volunteers. And Darby had helped foster a macho culture that dismissed the complaints. “He kicked in the door of a trailer where there were volunteers with guns on them. He did a lot of Wild West shit—Mister Macho Action Hero,” says Lisa Fithian, an early leader of Common Ground who was driven out by Darby. For Fithian, there was obvious misogyny involved in the blind support for Darby. “A lot of women had been hurt by this man, and a lot of men had defended him over the years, and it’s not okay,” she says.12 Other people in the organization’s leadership followed Darby’s example. In the macho atmosphere he fostered, talk of patriarchy or sexual assault was seen as a distraction.
At one point, allegations appeared online that Darby had sexually assaulted volunteers. His then-friend Common Ground cofounder scott crow worked to take the online postings down. “I used my connections with Indymedia all around the world to take it down, on server after server after server, because Brandon asked me to,” he said later. “I still stand by that, because you know, no physical person ever came forward, and no advocate for a physical person ever came forward and said, ‘He physically assaulted me.’”13
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