“If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something,” notes historian Eric Foner. “As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”51
While ignoring the crimes that built this nation, we celebrate the heroic individualist capitalist in our media and schools. Even those of us who have a radical critique of capitalism often find it hard to transcend the ethos of individuality that comes with being raised in this country.
People in movements today, even when they talk about financial divides, rarely examine how those divides manifest interpersonally. We might share statistics about inequality, but how often does that discussion include information about ourselves? It is seen as impolite to talk about our own money. As a result, both the very rich and very poor in the United States call themselves middle class. Kids brought up in the wealthiest homes are often taught to hide their class advantage, and especially if they enter social movements they must hide their privilege. Activists may protest a bank, not realizing that their friend’s father is the bank president.
Researchers and other scholars say they seek to help by bringing their skills to the study of an “underprivileged” community. But in almost every situation the community has no say in the research goals or process and never even sees the final product.
Writing about research on sex work, a masters candidate and former sex worker named Sarah M. wrote advice that should serve for anyone considering this kind of research. “If I can’t provide a direct, material benefit to the subjects of my investigation—if the money or the time or the will just isn’t there (and it often isn’t)—if my research is going to be all take and no give—I don’t do it. Period. I think, ‘Oh hey, it’d be nice to know <blah>,’ and then I find something else to study.”
“‘Nothing about us without us’ means that sex workers are so over research that uses our knowledge without paying us back,” she adds. “That investigates their lives without asking them what needs to be found out, or that talks about them behind their backs, protected from critique by an academic publisher’s paywall.”52
That phrase “nothing about us without us,” which came into use during the global disability rights movement of the 1980s, is a great guiding principle for movements. In examples I explore later in this book, FBI informant Brandon Darby rose to the leadership of an organization with thousands of volunteers despite having no relevant experience and no base in the community he was supposedly helping. Through the KONY 2012 campaign, a group of young white men from San Diego were suddenly hailed as experts on Africa.
In most cases, failure never even slows saviors down. They are experts in “failing up.” Though they may leave wreckage in their wake, they win praise and jobs as analysts and advisors. No one in power seems to notice or care what they left behind. In the social circles of entrepreneurs, failing means that you take risks, and failure is worn as a mark of pride. But one of the marks of having less privilege is that failure means something different. When poor people or people of color fail, they are confirming expectations.
Social change often comes from the young, and every cause wants to capture the attention of the idealistic next generation. As I discus later in this book, student groups dedicated to fighting “sex trafficking” have spread to campuses across the country, and Teach for America recruits at all the top colleges and universities.
Projects like fighting trafficking and teaching kids seem unambiguously good at first glance. But as I discuss later, charitable efforts that proceed without a demand for systemic change strengthen the system by providing an apolitical means of addressing the symptoms while ignoring the underlying issue. These “consensus” efforts are often the first introduction to activism for idealistic young people. Then, when these future activists discover that these projects are shams or at best misdirected, they may give up on the possibility of change altogether. When I speak with people who are not involved in social justice work at all, I find that their inaction comes not from thinking that nothing is wrong. Instead it often results from not seeing a systemic solution offered or from feeling alienated by the organizations that represent themselves as change makers.
An alternate solution to social problems lies in the words of the Zapatistas, who popularized the slogan Preguntando caminamos, or “Walking, we ask questions.” In other words, don’t be so afraid to take action that you are immobilized. But, as you take action, listen to the voices of those most affected, and be ready to change course based on their feedback. As author and activist John Holloway has said, “To think of moving forward through questions rather than answers means a different sort of politics, a different sort of organization.”53
Today a new generation of activists, from the Arab Spring and Occupy to the Movement for Black Lives, is rejecting charity and saviorism, challenging traditional forms of activism, and building a movement led by and accountable to those communities most affected by injustice. This book praises and documents some of the work of this generation of activists.
There are missteps and mistakes in these new movements too, as people learn by taking action. I think I make fewer mistakes now, or at least different ones, but I hold past mistakes close to my heart, as a reminder to keep asking questions. As Ngọc Loan Trần wrote on the Black Girl Dangerous blog, “We have to remind ourselves that we once didn’t know.”54 Just calling this behavior out and moving on makes little difference. I think it is the responsibility of those of us who come from privilege, and therefore are susceptible to saviorism, to engage in the hard work of building accountability to others and ourselves. This book maps a path from the savior mentality to shared liberation.
Chapter Two: We Are the World, We Are the Children
In 2015 I visited Dinétah, the homeland of the Diné (Navajo) people, spread across parts of what is also known as New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. In the last forty years an estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand Diné have been forcibly relocated off of that land by the federal government, working in collaboration with coal mining corporations. This is, of course, on top of centuries of genocide and displacement.
I met with Diné youth and elders who are fighting to maintain their land, homes, and culture, while the U.S. government is still trying to push them out. “They try to take every little thing that they can,” explains Selest Manning of Indigenous Youth for Cultural Survival, one of the organizations in the Diné community. “Basically just to get rid of us. If we don’t have our necessary things to survive, we won’t.”
Manning is still in her early twenties but already committed to the struggle. For her, resistance can be as basic as learning their language or helping elders stay on their land. She and a few other young activists organized a gathering in late 2015 for elders to pass along cultural knowledge to the next generation. “It’s not even about us anymore,” Manning told me. “It’s about the next seven generations now, and that’s why we’re here.”
In Dinétah, I also spoke with Berkley Carnine, a cisgender white woman activist who works in solidarity with the Diné community. Carnine’s views on social change were shaped in 2008, at age twenty-six, by her experience with the Anne Braden Program of the Catalyst Project, an antiracist training organization in the Bay Area. The Anne Braden Program is a four-month-long organizer development program for radical white activists. As part of her training, Carnine was placed with Generation Five, an organization whose mission is to end childhood sexual abuse in five generations. In response to many nonprofits that see their work as continuing forever, Generation Five want to be successful enough that they no longer need to exist. “They have incredible analysis of trauma, how and why that gets perpetuated, and the modes of individual and collective healing that are necessary to shift that,” Carnine told me. “They also had a pretty core analysis of colonialism and the sexual violence that has been deeply