No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality

Foreword

by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

As an organizer of women’s liberation and against the United States war in Southeast Asia, in 1969, I accepted an invitation to meet women representatives of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) near Montreal, Quebec. There were a hundred or so other such organizers present, mostly women, about half of them young like me, and half from an earlier generation of women’s peace organizations. The three NLF representatives, through a translator, spoke clearly, explaining in considerable detail the military situation in South Vietnam: U.S. massive expulsion of people from the countryside into refugee camps, with a kill everything that moves program in effect. They told us of their commitment and determination to drive the U.S. invaders out and thanked us for our solidarity and efforts to end the war. When the women opened the discussion, the first speaker, an older U.S. woman, asked how we might contribute funds to the NLF cause. Several other women, including the young, followed up with the same question and offers of checks right then and there. The translator explained the questions and offers to the NLF representative, then talked among themselves, selecting one of their number to respond. She said, We do not want your money, we do not need your money. We need you to love your own sons who are fighting and dying there and bring them home.

There was considerable confusion among the U.S. American women present, both young and old, a sort of desperate begging to provide material aid. This was the first time that I deeply understood what Jordan Flaherty dubs the savior mentality. Just having finished graduate school in the field of history, pieces of the puzzle of the apparent contradictions of U.S. imperialism—the populist urge to help the benighted around the world and the method for doing that always including making war on them—fell into place.

The author correctly begins this book with the Christian Crusades in 1096, and jumping across the Atlantic in 1492, as the foundation for the founding of a Republic (the United States) to rescue the Native. The very origin story of the United States forms the core of the savior project. In November 1620, English religious dissidents (Pilgrims) landed on the shore of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Forty-one of the Pilgrims, all men, wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, named after the ship they arrived on. Invoking God’s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed to North America to plant the First Colony and did therefore Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic to be governed by just and equal Laws enacted for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. A decade later, when additional English settlers founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they adopted an official seal designed in England prior to their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, Come over and help us. Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the U.S. military veterans of the Spanish-American War (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a dark, naked woman kneeling before an armed U.S. soldier and a sailor, with a U.S. battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

Today, U.S. American taxpayers believe they carry an enormous burden of development and crisis financial aid to peoples in need in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but in reality such aid accounts for only 0.19 percent of the U.S. GDP, and much of that is in kind or in loans. And, as I witnessed in 1969, U.S. Americans rush to contribute dubious calls for charity, often in tandem with U.S. sites of intervention, which then involves U.S. citizens emotionally in the cause, under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

Following the crushing defeat of the United States military by the Vietnamese and the U.S. emergency withdrawal in 1975, the mainstream press and educational institutions had embraced much of what the antiwar/anti-imperialism movement of the preceding decade had formulated, and a majority of the population opposed future interventions. And, although the U.S. Congress and many politicians made gestures in the form of investigations into the illegal activities of both the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency for domestic abuses, armed interventions continued covertly in Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In the wake of post-war recession, inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, the oil crisis, and general malaise identified with the positive reforms by Governor Jerry Brown in California and President Jimmy Carter, by 1980, Sunbelt quasi-fascism and the military-industrial complex had found the perfect candidate to restore confidence through militarism and extreme nationalism: Ronald Reagan. Yet the interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador and in Southern Africa were widely opposed in the 1980s, with fears of another Vietnam, but were sapped of energy by intensive Cold War anticommunist propaganda. When Vice-President George H. W. Bush, former CIA chief in the 1970s, took the presidency, he tested the mood by launching a lightning invasion of Panama in December 1989, removing the sitting president and imprisoning him in a federal penitentiary, with little protest, and general mainstream media support.

The following summer plans (Desert Shield) for the invasion of Iraq began with a troop build up of a half-million U.S. professional volunteers poised to launch the invasion in early 1991 (Desert Storm). This was conceived by the Bush administration as a way to end the Vietnam Syndrome. It was also presented, like the invasion of Panama, as ridding the country of a brutal dictator. The highly publicized story (fabrication) that the administration created of Iraqi soldiers invading a Kuwaiti hospital and pulling the tubes out of premature babies awakened the savior mentality, eliciting fervent support for the U.S. invasion. It was accompanied by the drumbeat of Support our Troops, advertised as a reversal of the presumed maltreatment of Vietnam veterans, although no such treatment, least of all hippies spitting on returning vets, was ever documented.

At the same time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and broke down into independent republics, and the stage was set for the resurgence of U.S. military domination through the North American Treaty Alliance (NATO). The United Nations, cowed by the Bush administration audacity, and absent previous Soviet objections, passed a resolution to legalize the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

What followed in the 1990s, as the author recounts, billionaire George Soros bankrolled non-governmental organizations and actors, such as the journalist Samantha Power, to push for a policy of humanitarian intervention, achieving success in the United Nations by 2005, with the institutionalization of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect.

This, then, is new U.S. imperialism, supported by both Neoconservatives and Neoliberals, twisting the argument about U.S. military expansion around the world and endless wars as one between isolationism and internationalism, between generosity in helping beleaguered populations and selfishness in arguing the U.S. can’t afford it, with their populist calls to let those people take care of their own demons. So, the savior mentality is key to the continuation of brutal United States militarism and the phantom war on terror.

In the words of Vietnamese-American war refugee writer Viet Thanh Nguyen: Armored cosmopolitanism is the new spin on the white man’s burden, where the quaint idea of civilizing the world becomes retailored for culturally sensitive capitalists in the service of the United States, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund.¹

Jordan Flaherty demonstrates how this mentality also seeps in and even guides much of our oppositional projects, and that is the point of this book, our own complicity in intervention and the absence of a significant antiwar, anti-­imperialist movement.

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? Am I an expert? No. Because it is a way to engage with Black liberation that’s not about being the good white person in the room.

Many 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