people with privilege are actually bored, estranged, and disconnected, Breedlove says, seeking what they perceive as the excitement of belonging to an oppressed group. As a queer woman, she’s encountered this dynamic from straight people. “I’ve found straight people in my life who covet the depth of emotional intimacy that those of us who are queer have forged in the struggle because we’ve been through a lot together, and there’s a form of intimacy, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
This desire for “the high and passion and urgency and realness of what marginalized people need to do to thrive and survive” leads to cultural appropriation and insensitivity, she says. “The well-intentioned are always reaching out. ‘What is your culture? Tell me about all your inner pain.’ It’s forced intimacy. It’s not wanting to turn the reporting back on yourself.”
“How can you ask yourself a different set of questions?” asks Breedlove. “What’s missing for you? Why are you trying to help everyone else? What are the actions for social justice and movement building that don’t center you as a protagonist?”
For people born into privilege, decentering yourself can feel difficult. It involves giving up a certain amount of privilege, and when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.4 Being born with privilege, it’s easy to become so used to that privilege that we think of it as the natural order of things. Stepping outside of that privilege feels unnatural, but it’s a crucial step to challenging systems of inequality.
“What we need is strategies that don’t make us look as good, don’t make us as visible,” says Breedlove. “Most savior types are speaking of themselves as martyrs but are actually doing exactly what they want to do, because a lot of the work that needs to be done is pretty boring.” We sometimes expect everyone to feel sorry for us for taking on a lot of leadership, while we are actually avoiding the work we really don’t want to do, like the behind-the-scenes work of child care or answering phones that often falls on women and people of color. It’s important for people with privilege to ask the hard questions about what it would mean to really take chances, to really be an ally instead of a savior.
This work of undoing the savior mentality is not easy. Its history runs deep.
In AD 1096, Pope Urban II launched the Crusades—three centuries of massacres of Jews, Muslims, and other nonbelievers that ultimately left up to three million people dead. He masked his call for violence in the language of peace: “Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.”5 That is the savior at its worst, with lies of peace and generosity masking violent self-interest. It is as old as conquest and as enduring as colonialism.
Christopher Columbus brought boats filled with saviors to the Americas, on a mission to “save” whomever he encountered by conversion to Christianity. Like saviors today, he spoke of generosity and freedom. “I knew that they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force,” he wrote, as he launched history’s bloodiest genocide.6
The most violent massacres are often portrayed as the efforts of virtuous men to rescue women and children. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson said Native women left to their own societies “are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their equality.”7 Later ethnic cleansing came in the form of “rescuing” Native Americans by forcing them into “boarding schools” that would violently erase their language, culture, and history. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” said Richard Pratt, the founder of the first of these schools. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”8
Hundreds of years after Columbus, war and colonialism are still depicted as a form of rescue, as necessary to bring freedom. In 1999, embracing what Noam Chomsky later called the “New Military Humanism,” the New York Times described President Clinton’s bombing of Serbia as the actions of an “idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity.”9 In 2001 George W. Bush continued this connection by making the argument for invading Afghanistan (as later with Iraq), on human rights grounds. He also made his connection to earlier campaigns of violence against the Muslim world clear when he referred to his so-called War on Terror as a “crusade.” Channeling Jefferson, Laura Bush called for support for an invasion of Afghanistan by saying, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”10
Less than two years later, as the administration was pushing to invade Iraq, Vice President Cheney famously bragged, “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Bush described his push toward war as a way to rescue the Iraqi people. “I have a deep desire for peace [and] freedom for the Iraqi people,” he said, adding that the United States “never has any intention to conquer anybody.” A few months after the invasion, Bush declared triumphantly, “The Iraqi people are now free and are learning the habits of freedom and the responsibilities that come with freedom.” The next year, Cheney declared, “Freedom still has enemies in Iraq—terrorists who are targeting the very success and freedom that we’re providing to that country.”
Nearly the entire world stood against this invasion. But some U.S. liberals, stating concern about the Taliban and other (mostly Muslim) state forces that they saw as repressive to women (and perhaps also seeing the potential for funding and access to the corridors of power), allied themselves with Bush’s foreign policy. In 2004, feminist academics Phyllis Chesler and Donna M. Hughes, writing in the Washington Post, declared the need to “rethink” feminism and join with U.S. imperialism. “Many feminists are out of touch with the realities of the war that has been declared against the secular, Judeo-Christian, modern West,” they wrote. “They are still romanticizing and cheering for Third World anti-colonialist movements, without a realistic view of what will happen to the global status of women if the Islamists win. Many feminists continue to condemn the United States, a country in which, for the most part, their ideas have triumphed.”11
In addition to throwing their lot in with Bush’s wars and equating criticism of Israel with racism, the authors called for an alliance with the religious right against sex work, and they added, “Too often [feminists] have viewed organized religion only as a dangerous form of patriarchy, when it can also be a system of law and ethics that benefits women.”
During the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power embodied the new imperialist feminism. Power was a close advisor to Obama during his 2008 campaign, went on to be appointed to Obama’s National Security Council, and in 2013 became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She is pro–human rights, feminist, and pro-LGBT while also pro-Israel and pro-imperialist. She is a champion of so-called “humanitarian intervention,” from the 1995 NATO bombing of Serbia to the U.S.-led “no-fly” zone in Libya in 2011. Power is even friendly with war criminal Henry Kissinger, who she publicly bonded with over baseball and foreign policy.12
Hillary Clinton has long cloaked herself in both feminism and hawkish foreign policy, from her 2003 support of the Bush war on Iraq to her pro-war 2008 and 2016 campaigns for president.
Activist and author Harsha Walia calls this kind of feminism “a handmaiden to cultural imperialism, essentializing communities of color as innately barbaric.” Walia is critical of human rights work that uses the label of feminism to mask imperialism. “Women and queers are supposedly devoid of any agency—forced to veil, subjected to honor killings, coerced into arranged marriages. In the post-9/11 context, cultural imperialism is evident in debates about gender and Islam that force a singular feminism—secular, sexually expressive, and liberal autonomist—on women and queers of color.”13
Saviorism
