to shared liberation.
Chapter Two: We Are the World, We Are the Children
In 2015 I visited Dinétah, the homeland of the Diné (Navajo) people, spread across parts of what is also known as New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. In the last forty years an estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand Diné have been forcibly relocated off of that land by the federal government, working in collaboration with coal mining corporations. This is, of course, on top of centuries of genocide and displacement.
I met with Diné youth and elders who are fighting to maintain their land, homes, and culture, while the U.S. government is still trying to push them out. “They try to take every little thing that they can,” explains Selest Manning of Indigenous Youth for Cultural Survival, one of the organizations in the Diné community. “Basically just to get rid of us. If we don’t have our necessary things to survive, we won’t.”
Manning is still in her early twenties but already committed to the struggle. For her, resistance can be as basic as learning their language or helping elders stay on their land. She and a few other young activists organized a gathering in late 2015 for elders to pass along cultural knowledge to the next generation. “It’s not even about us anymore,” Manning told me. “It’s about the next seven generations now, and that’s why we’re here.”
In Dinétah, I also spoke with Berkley Carnine, a cisgender white woman activist who works in solidarity with the Diné community. Carnine’s views on social change were shaped in 2008, at age twenty-six, by her experience with the Anne Braden Program of the Catalyst Project, an antiracist training organization in the Bay Area. The Anne Braden Program is a four-month-long organizer development program for radical white activists. As part of her training, Carnine was placed with Generation Five, an organization whose mission is to end childhood sexual abuse in five generations. In response to many nonprofits that see their work as continuing forever, Generation Five want to be successful enough that they no longer need to exist. “They have incredible analysis of trauma, how and why that gets perpetuated, and the modes of individual and collective healing that are necessary to shift that,” Carnine told me. “They also had a pretty core analysis of colonialism and the sexual violence that has been deeply rooted in colonialism.”
Connecting personal and systemic violence sparked new understanding in Carnine. “I was understanding things that have been harmful for me and seeing how and why I couldn’t feel okay in the world, because I was benefiting from the bodily harm and violence that was being done on such a broad and massive scale against people of color.” She started asking, “What is the trauma I carry from violence against me, but also what [are] trauma and patterns of abuse that I carry because of the violence that was done for me?”
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
