depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.”45
It’s by design that this myth of great men shaping history is taught in our schools. Similarly it was no aberration when Arizona conservatives passed a law banning books that “bred ethnic resentment,” including many written by Latino authors. Conservative politicians were decades ahead of progressives in grasping the importance of winning school board elections and controlling curricula. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future.” The United States was born through genocide and built by slavery. But we are collectively unwilling to teach future generations about the crimes through which our nation was born. Germans have paid nearly one hundred billion dollars to Jewish people in reparations.46 In the United States, discussions about reparations for slavery or for the genocide against Native Americans remain off limits for most politicians and even the most liberal of commentators. German schools teach about the Holocaust perpetrated by their forebears. But a 1957 history textbook used in Virginia described slavery this way: “Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked. They were not so unhappy as some Northerners thought they were.”47 This whitewashing has hardly gone away—in fact, it’s making a comeback. As recently as 2015, Texas textbooks referred to enslaved Africans as “workers” to avoid describing the ugly reality of the slave trade.48
There are very few museums that confront the history of slavery and the legalized discrimination of the Jim Crow era in this country. “The endnote in most . . . museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful,” notes historian Paul Finkelman. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”49
American history is much more eager to learn lessons from the crimes of others. Across the United States there are European Holocaust museums and memorials but scarcely a mention of the genocide of Africans and Native Americans, a brutality that continues today in reservations and in cities like Ferguson, Missouri. Or in the words of rapper Chuck D from Public Enemy, “The cost of the Holocaust / I’m talking about the one still going on.”50
“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
