grapples with how to fight for change without putting herself at the center. What does it mean to not be from a community but still be accountable to their struggle? She seeks the answer through principled, accountable work as an ally. She has not sought to be a leader or a spokesperson but to help make space for indigenous activists to lead themselves, by taking on tasks like herding sheep that might otherwise take up their time.
“Decolonization is about mutual self-determination between people groups without the colonial state as mediator,” adds Carnine in a document written with fellow BMIS organizer Liza Minno Bloom. Among the other steps they advise for activists seeking decolonization:
Know whose land you’re on and “acknowledge that you are on occupied land when you say where you are or where you are from.”
Shift the entitlement inherent in settler experience by asking permission to be on the land.
Know where your water, heat, electricity and other resources come from.
Incorporate an analysis of settler colonialism into all of your organizing work, even if you are not working explicitly on Indigenous solidarity.31
These examples are a good baseline for any kind of solidarity work.
Chapter Three: The Death of Riad Hamad
I met Brandon Darby in New Orleans in 2004. He was twenty-eight, with a widow’s peak, a dimple on his chin, and a cool confidence that belied an intense passion when he got worked up. We talked about Palestinian rights, and he immediately expressed his support for anti-colonial armed resistance. He wanted me to know that he was ready to die for the cause of revolution. He also talked about his friendship with Robert King, who had been one of three imprisoned Black Panthers at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, collectively known as the Angola Three. King had spent twenty-nine years in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit, was freed in 2001, and eventually moved to Austin, Texas, where Darby lived. Darby told me the militants of the civil rights and Black Power movements inspired him.
Reading the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Assata Shakur radicalized me as a young activist, and as Darby talked about the Black Panthers and Palestinian freedom struggles while smoking cigarettes and drinking a beer he projected a white working-class cool that appealed to me. He had a compelling pattern of speech, expressing radical ideas about revolution or imperialism as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He would emphasize his passion through repetition, saying quietly, “There’s something wrong with a system that would allow this to happen, you know? There’s something wrong.” He would pause at a common word or phrase, as if offering to define it for you. “The FBI was afraid of the Panthers’ free breakfast program,” he might say. “You know, breakfast?”
Darby was visiting New Orleans and talking about moving there from Austin. That didn’t happen, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. Then, less than a year later, New Orleans was submerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Darby was back.
His story of returning to New Orleans quickly became legend. He had come in a car with scott crow, an anarchist activist also from Austin. They had come to rescue Robert King. Darby had taken a boat to Robert King’s house, faced down state troopers who got in his way, and rescued King from his house. “I knew I had to save King’s life, and I wasn’t going to let federal authorities or the New Orleans police force stop me,” he later said.1 Then he and crow went to the Algiers neighborhood, where they helped former Black Panther Malik Rahim face down armed white vigilantes. Robert King later disputed elements of this story, but by then the legend had taken on a life of its own.
Darby quickly became a leader of Common Ground, an anarchist-leaning volunteer group that brought thousands of young, mostly white volunteers in to work on rebuilding New Orleans. Founded by Rahim, his partner Sharon Johnson, Darby, and crow, Common Ground began with a well-informed critique of the massive failures of the Red Cross and other aid agencies.2 Their defined goal was to support local control of the recovery. Their slogan was “Solidarity, Not Charity.” From the beginning, Darby was impatient with the non-hierarchical organizing style many of the founders and volunteers came with. “For some, Common Ground might have been about creating a little anarchist utopia,” he later said. “For me, it was about helping people have their rights heard and have their homes [restored], and it was about getting things done.”3
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
