After the training ended, she moved to Arizona and was inspired by the indigenous resistance happening in an area known as Black Mesa. Carnine joined Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS), a group of mostly non-indigenous activists “working in solidarity with Native people upholding their responsibility in protecting land.” Since 2012 she has lived in nearby Flagstaff. She helps to train and coordinate the efforts of non-indigenous solidarity activists who wish to stand with the Diné resistance.
Carnine sees her work as part of an overall decolonization process, resisting the structures of settler colonialism our society is based in. She says that sometimes people from our settler culture interpret decolonization as meaning “making spaces more inclusive of Indigenous people,” which she says reproduces the assumption “that settlers are the rightful inheritors of the space to begin with.” Carnine says that true decolonization requires something more radical than being inclusive.
“Decolonizing the mind is about unlearning colonial mentalities and modes of relating based in western logic, exploitation, domination, entitlement, and individualism, based in disconnection from each other and the land,” Carnine says. “Also, this means doing the work of learning our various histories and understanding how our ancestors were first colonized to become colonizers.” This analysis of the importance of challenging your own privilege before you can stand with others is key for anyone doing international solidarity.
Colonialism has historically been enforced by military violence, but today’s conquests are often masked as charity. And international aid has become the first line of engagement. We engage with the world as saviors and leave devastation behind. In most cases we do not seek to listen and follow, like Carnine, but instead to lead and dominate.
In 1843 President Andrew Jackson famously called U.S. territorial expansion “extending the area of freedom,” an ideology also known as Manifest Destiny (as in a destiny of white people to dominate the rest of the world). A half-century later, Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling would make this racist call even more explicit with his poem “White Man’s Burden”:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Since Jackson’s day, U.S. foreign policy has changed in tone but not mission. We still define ourselves as rulers of the world. We’re just more polite about it. U.S. international aid is contingent on accepting our country’s moral instruction and political guidance. Our cultural assumption is that our wealth and power imbue us with moral authority. Our government provides development aid and loans through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, but that aid comes with demands for neoliberal restructuring. We donate to rebuild after disasters, but U.S. disaster relief comes with instructions to buy U.S. products. We engage with the world as helpers but only on our own terms, in ways that benefit us.
Our government gives money to fight AIDS around the world, but it has traditionally been given with restrictions against preventative measures like needle exchange programs or efforts on behalf of sex workers. In 2003 the Bush administration passed the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which required organizations receiving funding to sign the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath (APLO). All organizations receiving PEPFAR funding had to explicitly oppose prostitution in their policies. This meant they could not even give a condom to a sex worker, much less support sex worker–led movements.
“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex,” wrote Teju Cole in a series of tweets later reprinted in the Atlantic. Cole was criticizing a general trend but also specifically targeting neoliberal economist Jeffrey Sachs, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and a charity called Invisible Children, best known for their KONY 2012 video. Cole went on:
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
I deeply respect American sentimentality; the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.1
Cole notes that the savior individual is often from the United States but focused on the world, particularly Africa. The savior sees dark skin and translates that to helplessness. And saviors see their own white skin as validation of the gifts they bring.
Author Binyavanga Wainaina, in a satirical essay titled “How to Write about Africa,” identified the patterns he has seen in non-Africans writing about Africa. His words are a stinging reminder of the ways in which colonial attitudes persist. Although his essay is directed at writers, it applies well to the many Westerners who have enriched their resumes and assuaged their consciences with charity work in communities that are not their own—from remote African villages to U.S. inner cities. Via social media these young white people spice up their vacations, posting photos of themselves with the darker-skinned children they have helped as evidence of their goodwill. “Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable,” writes Wainaina, “and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”2
At elite schools, students are recruited for the Peace Corps, which sends them after graduation to countries they know little about, to do unpaid work that takes jobs away from locals or that helps maintain corrupt or authoritarian governments.3 Sometimes this work even entails feeding information back to U.S. intelligence services.4 Outside the elites, young people are recruited by the military, often with similar claims of helping others in faraway lands.
Many of the most offensive charitable campaigns involve white people “saving” Africa, but they never mention the history of colonial exploitation that led to poverty in Africa in the first place. The classic of the entertainment industry’s “savior pop” genre is the 1984 Bob Geldof song, sung by a forgettable assemblage of eighties pop stars, “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which also includes the tellingly offensive line “Thank God it’s them instead of you.”
The song (and Live Aid, the subsequent project it birthed) raised over $100 million for famine relief. But when journalists dug deeper, they noted that the issues leading to the famine could not be solved through charity. Massive numbers of people in Ethiopia were dying. However, the primary cause was not a lack of food or bad weather leading to reduced crops. People were starving because of the political decisions of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
As one reporter noted at the time, “Ethiopia, which has the largest standing army in Africa, is embroiled in four internal