Introduction
It was a beautiful spring evening in New Orleans when I ran into Brandon Darby at a café in the Marigny neighborhood. After a quick hello, he lowered his voice. “Have you seen the news today?”1
“What do you mean?”
Darby was an activist who carried himself with an air of self-importance and liked to brag about his guns and plans for revolution. He often started conversations with questions like this, delivered with a mysterious and urgent air. But this sounded more serious than usual.
“It’s Riad. He’s dead.” He gave an awkward, nervous smile. “I feel kind of bad about it.”
I was speechless. Darby went on to tell me that the body of my friend Riad Hamad had been found with his hands and feet bound, floating in a lake. He voiced what sounded like a conspiracy theory, telling me he thought perhaps the government had killed Riad. Less than two years later, Darby would publicly announce his role as an FBI informant who had conspired to imprison Riad and others.
When I think about that night and about Riad’s strange and sudden death, I still feel pain and grief. In looking for answers, I return to unanswered questions about the role of Darby in Riad’s death. Then I turn inward, looking at my own responsibility in not speaking up as Darby rose to his positions of power and influence in my community.
Darby had a magnetic charm, and social movements have an unfortunate history of following the leadership of charismatic hero figures. I’ve come to think of this as the savior mentality, the idea that a hero will come and answer our societal problems, like Superman saving Lois Lane or a firefighter rescuing a kitten from a tree. It’s a simplistic view of change, taught by religion, popular culture, and our school system.
The idea of a heroic rescue is compelling to me as well, and I’ve made many mistakes in my attempts to do good over the years. Too often I was one of those who saw and said too little, or who took action without looking into what the long-term effects were likely to be.
Over years of working as a journalist, I have encountered this savior mentality repeatedly. From New Orleans to Phoenix to Anchorage to Gaza, I have seen pain caused by those who say they are coming to help. As I discuss in the coming pages, I have seen idealistic young activists pulled into campaigns on behalf of “saving” sex workers through policing. I’ve seen them plan international “voluntourism” trips and consider joining Teach For America; all in the name of rescuing those less-fortunate than themselves.
I have also spent time observing and participating in popular uprisings—from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Occupy Wall Street to the Movement for Black Lives—that have consciously challenged this dynamic. I have learned from the people most affected by so-called saviors: the people with the least privilege, who resisted easy solutions and have built grassroots, accountable movements focused on systemic change. From these front lines of social justice struggles, I have learned firsthand the importance of systemic solutions to the problems we face.
I am indebted to the people on the frontlines of these movements, who have seen saviors claim to help them as they make things worse. The best analysis of saviors comes from those who have been on the receiving end of their rescues, and my goal here is to amplify their voices. I believe that with the privileged position I was born into, it is important to speak up against white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems that uphold the advantages I have as a white, cisgender male. My purpose in writing this book is not to supplant the voices of those with less privilege, but to create a tool and resource for all of us to challenge these systems and stand together with already existing movements to create a better world.
Chapter One: The History of Saviors
Caitlin Breedlove grew up queer in the Midwest in a mixed-class white immigrant family. In 2003 she moved to Tennessee and worked for three years at the Highlander Center, a movement training space in the hills of rural Tennessee started by radical labor activists in the 1930s. Highlander continued to be an important center during the civil rights movement, training Rosa Parks and many other important leaders and activists.
Suzanne Pharr, a longtime white antiracist organizer, was the director of the Highlander Center when Breedlove arrived, and she helped mentor Breedlove in avoiding the pitfalls of the savior mentality. “There are a lot of smart white girls with great ideas,” she told Breedlove. “Be more than that.” Pharr taught her to listen and build trust with communities of color, rather than seeking to lead them. “People are being told what to do and where to do it every day of their lives. They don’t need another person coming in and telling them how to do it,” said Pharr.
The assumption that you have something to contribute to communities you know nothing about is “an incredibly entitled notion,” adds Breedlove. “To think that you can save someone you really must think highly of yourself.”2
Breedlove went on to spend nine years as codirector of the LGBT racial justice organization Southerners On New Ground (SONG). The organization seeks liberation for all people, building power among working-class LGBT communities in the South, uniting across class, age, race, ability, gender, immigration status, and sexuality. Through working in grassroots queer communities, she helped the organization grow to three thousand members and one hundred member-leaders. They fought repressive and racist laws, such as an anti-immigrant bill in Georgia, and changed attitudes through one-on-one conversations, media work, and direct action. Breedlove left SONG in 2015 to become campaign director of Standing on the Side of Love, a social justice campaign of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Mentorship from elders like Pharr was central to Breedlove’s growth as an organizer, along with time outside of traditional movement spaces, like conversations in working-class gay bars in small southern towns. Breedlove says that activists with privilege should ask how they are centering or decentering themselves, which “means getting feedback from people you don’t have power over.” In other words, if you run an organization, you need to hear feedback from people who aren’t on staff and have no reason to hesitate in being honest with you. “How are you aligned with people who are quietly getting things done, who sometimes are white?” adds Breedlove. “Not ‘How you are aligned with the loudest voice of the Good White People Club?’”
Breedlove’s codirector in SONG was Paulina Helm-Hernandez, a queer Latina organizer and artist. In a reflection on their shared lessons of nine years of working together, Helm-Hernandez said, “I think white people in movement building need to make a call about whether they will be individual activists or if they are really ready to commit to collective organizing. The latter means that you don’t have to always be the final vote on the strategy, pace, timing, tone, and approach. Put another way, it means you have to learn how to share political imagination, power, and work without having to always be in charge.” At the same time, she says, “I don’t want them to go to those antiracist trainings where they get declawed and told that they should just sit quietly in meetings and then follow people of color around asking them what to do. I want them to have their claws. They need them . . . we are in a region, a moment, a country where those claws are needed for the enemies who are killing us.”
“Doing workshops with other white people is not enough,” adds Helm-Hernandez. “You need backbone. You need practice, you need to take risks, be uncomfortable, and stand side-by-side with leaders of color and do what needs to be done. You have to be willing to trust leaders of color who have the track record, integrity, and vision to get things done.”3
It is crucial for people with privilege to work and struggle and take risks and have difficult conversations within their own communities. “I want to have more conversations with other white people about reparations,” says Breedlove. “Why?
