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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 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 was conceived in a Christian theology that has been a guiding principle in the Americas for at least five hundred years, but to be a savior one need not be religious or American. We in the United States have perfected saviorism in the same way that we made colonialism ours. And while most progressives today would recoil at the actions of colonialists from Columbus to Cheney, there is a clear line from the brutality of America’s founding to the soft violence of unchallenged privilege and the many charitable projects that it entails.

Today’s saviors are kinder and gentler than the era of the Crusades. They are no longer launching mass genocide and calling it a gift. But they still hold on to that inherited tradition by believing in their own superiority and refusing to listen to those they say they want to serve. This book is about the saviors of today and how our social movements can and must break with this inheritance of violence. The path of Caitlin Breedlove, of listening and learning and engaging in accountable collective action, is one solution. Breedlove is just one of many principled activists creating alternatives to our current poisonous system.

The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others, no matter the situation. The message that they are the experts in all things has been reinforced since birth. They are taught that saving others is the burden they must bear.

Having privilege means not having to ever notice your own power or the systems that gave you that power. “Growing up in segregated environments (schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, media images and historical perspectives), white interests and perspectives are almost always central,” writes anti­racist scholar Robin DiAngelo. “An inability to see or consider significance in the perspectives of people of color results.”14

The savior mentality means that you want to help others but are not open to guidance from those you want to help. Saviors fundamentally believe they are better than the people they are rescuing. Saviors want to support the struggle of communities that are not their own, but they believe they must remain in charge. The savior always wants to lead, never to follow. When the people they have chosen to rescue tell them they are not helping, they think those people are mistaken. It is almost taken as evidence that they need more help.

The savior mentality is not about individual failings. It is the logical result of a racist, colonialist, capitalist, hetero-­patriarchal system setting us against each other. And being a savior is not a fixed identity. Under the struggle to survive within capitalism, most of us are forced into decisions that contradict our ideals. Many people are involved in liberation movements in their free time while their day job is at a charity or other nonprofit that does not challenge the status quo. We can be a savior one day and an ally the next.

The savior mentality always looks for solutions by working within our current system, because deeper change might push us out of the picture. This focus on quick fixes is also partly a product of an outrage-oriented media. We pay attention to an issue for one day, and we want to hear that someone will be fired or arrested. If that happens, we move on.

Saviors adopt trendy labels such as social entrepreneur or change agent. They preach the religion of kinder capitalism, the idea that you can get rich while also helping others, that the pursuit of profit, described with buzzwords like engagement, innovation, and sharing economy, will improve everyone’s lives through efficiency. However, I stand with nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac, who wrote that behind every fortune is a concealed crime. I don’t believe you can get rich while doing good—wealth and justice are mutually exclusive. The more wealth exists in the world, the less justice.

“There’s a term, social entrepreneurship, that I see tossed around a lot these days,” says poverty lawyer Dean Spade. “That what we just need is the right person to graduate from Harvard, maybe Harvard Business School, and have this vision about how to change poverty, how to end poverty. That kind of imagination, that there’s just the smart right-thinking charismatic individual, and that’s how change is made, is completely the opposite of everything we know about movements. We know that real expertise and leadership around transforming poverty is going to come from masses of poor people in coordinated movement together solving these problems and creating a new world.”15

This paucity of imagination has led to a bleaker life for all of us. If all of our “solutions” are just tinkering within the system, how can we truly imagine, let alone build, a better world? It’s also disempowering—it teaches that most people will have no role in affecting the problems that afflict them.

For some, the journey to more accountable activism can be difficult. People with privilege often respond with defensiveness when their privilege is pointed out. Robin DiAngelo coined the term white fragility to describe white reactions to criticism from people of color, including “the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” All of which, she notes, serves to “reinstate white racial equilibrium.”16

White people have a hard time talking about what racism is. When someone is a member of the Klan or says racial slurs, we call that racism. But when we discuss race we often don’t discuss systems that maintain inequality and injustice. Scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”17 It’s not about feelings and words; it’s about the devastation visited upon communities of color by systems like capitalism and white supremacy.

Novelist and activist Sarah Schulman describes privilege as seeing your dominance as “simultaneously nonexistent and as the natural deserving order . . . the self-deceived premise that one’s power is acquired by being deserved and has no machinery of enforcement.”18 Those who have power hate accountability, she adds, in favor of “vagueness, lack of delineation of how things work, the idea that people do not have to keep their promises.”19

The privilege of the able-bodied leads to people with disabilities being pushed out of our movements and our society. Saviors often see people with disabilities as fundamentally less than a full person, of needing help, rather than having wisdom and experience to learn from. Rather than deserving political power and autonomy, they are supposed to be grateful for telethons and sympathy. The disability justice movement is mostly led by people of color, and advocates for change on an intersectional model, as opposed to the mostly white-led disability rights movement. (“Intersectionality” refers to a way of looking at interlocking identities and oppressions and was coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989). Disability justice says we all must move forward together or it’s not really justice. It issues a challenge to the able-bodied. As poet, author, and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has said, “You need to change the way your life is and the way movements are so we can actually be part of that radical imagination.”20

People with privilege are raised to see their own experience as central and objective. We can’t imagine a story in which we are not the protagonist. We can’t imagine a different, ­better economic system. We can’t imagine a world without white, cisgendered, male ­dominance.

Saviors are not interested in examining their own privilege. We don’t want to see that the systems of race and class and gender that keep us in comfort where we are—in the “right” jobs and neighborhoods and schools—are the same systems that created the problems we say we want to solve.

Charity is often seen as the wealthy helping the less fortunate. But the roots of modern charity have a sinister undertone, rooted in maintaining inequality. Charitable gifts in the postcolonial Americas came with biological warfare. In 1763 Lord Jeffrey Amherst plotted to give blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans, writing to a colonel at Fort Pitt, “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”21 Of course, most of today’s charitable enterprises do not have such murderous intentions. But in many ways they have not come that far from the days of Amherst—generous on the surface, but with deadly consequences.

The Progressive Era in U.S. politics, from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, represented a rise in charitable giving and a more active role for the federal government in blunting the sharpest abuses of capitalism (passing labor reforms like the minimum wage law, for example, and antitrust statutes). But this era, when colonial expansion was publicly defended through the philosophy of manifest destiny, also modeled the condescending kindness we see in the worst kinds of charity today. This was also the era of forced sterilizations and hospitalizations of people with disabilities. In other words, military invasions in the “best interests” of those being invaded abroad and interventions into the lives of poor people at home, also to “help.”

Entities like the Charity Organization Societies provided aid to the poor while catering to wealthy sensibilities. The New York branch’s Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors among the Poor divided the “worthy cases needing relief” from the “shiftless cases needing counsel, stimulus, and work.” In words that have been echoed by charitable givers a million times since, the handbook advises, “It is well for the visitor to bear in mind the important distinction between poverty resulting from misfortune and that resulting from ignorance or vice.”22

Philanthropy is portrayed as generous, but where did that money come from? Have the Rockefeller and Ford charities washed the blood off of their family names, and should we allow them to? The more than $700 billion held by U.S. foundations is twice stolen. It was stolen the first time by making profit from the work of others (employees or even slaves) and from the earth’s resources. The money was stolen a second time when the wealthy avoided taxes by funneling their fortunes through foundations, which allow them to dictate how the money will be spent.23

As rapper and mogul Jay-Z wrote in his book Decoded: “To some degree charity is a racket in a capitalist system, a way of making our obligations to each other optional, and of keeping poor people feeling a sense of indebtedness to the rich, even if the rich spend every other day exploiting those same people.”24

When charities and other nonprofits seek to “save” poor people, they often end up perpetuating unjust hierarchies. Sixty percent of U.S. nonprofits see their mission as serving people of color. Sixty-three percent say that diversity is a key value of their organization. Yet 93 percent of nonprofit chief executives, 92 percent of their boards, and 82 percent of their staff are white. Thirty percent of nonprofit boards are all-white.25 These statistics suggest that the people directing and funding these organizations have absorbed the idea that people of color are not the experts in what they need.

Despite mission statements that nobly describe commitment to racial justice, many of these “liberal” or humanitarian organizations are just a couple staffing changes (or less) from having the look of a white supremacist organization. And if you don’t think any people of color are qualified to work on your project to help people of color, are you sure you’re not a white supremacist? What is your definition of white supremacy if it does not include undervaluing the work, intelligence, and experience of people of color?

In my experience with unpaid and less formalized grassroots activism, it is often those who have the most leisure time—which is generally those with the most privilege—who end up being in leadership positions. Especially when there are no official leaders.26 And after they “generously” give their time, they are the first to use that experience on their resume, on a research project, or just to brag about to their friends. “The poor have long provided cultural currency to the rich,” writes scholar Gabriel Winant. “The social attitudes and political ideology of elites have understood the ghetto as a credibility gold mine.”27

Charity is often an expression of a belief that current injustices will continue forever. “The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves,” writes Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity,’ the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well.” Friere continues, “An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity,’ which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes that nourish false charity.”28

This injustice arises with even with basic acts of generosity, such as serving free food. Author and scholar Janet Poppendieck writes that soup kitchens help a right-wing agenda of shrinking government. “By harnessing a wealth of volunteer effort and donations, [food distribution programs make] private programs appear cheaper and more cost effective than their public counterparts, thus reinforcing an ideology of voluntarism that obscures the fundamental destruction of rights,” she writes. “And, because food programs are logistically demanding, their maintenance absorbs the attention and energy of many of the people most concerned about the poor, distracting them from the larger issues of distributional politics. It is not an accident that poverty grows deeper as our charitable responses to it multiply.”29

Referencing scholar Jennifer Wolch, Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this nonprofit infrastructure of care the “shadow state.” She notes that each of these organizations operate “without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way.”30

Poppendieck writes that in New York City there were thirty emergency food providers in 1979, and more than fifteen times as many just eight years later. By 1991 that number had climbed to 730, and by 1997 nearly a thousand.31 During this time, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations were slashing government benefits for the poor, and the rise of nonprofit services like food pantries contributed to “society’s failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty.”

“Massive charitable endeavor serves to relieve pressure for more fundamental solutions,” writes Poppendieck. “It works pervasively on the cultural level by serving as sort of a ‘moral safety valve’; it reduces the discomfort evoked by visible destitution in our midst by creating the illusion of effective action and offering us myriad ways of participating in it. It creates a culture of charity that normalizes destitution and legitimates personal generosity as a response to major social and economic dislocation.”32

Of course, when food, housing, and other basic needs become a gift instead of a right, they are subject to all of the prejudices of the generous. The gift can be taken back from those who are not deserving or grateful enough. Those who are too decadent or perverse or lazy or rebellious may not qualify to receive the gift in the first place.

Many organizations that help provide housing to homeless people speak of “housing readiness,” in which people must show they are “ready” to have homes. But what about the reverse of that question? Is anyone ready for homelessness? Should any of us have to be? If we recognize housing as a right, that eliminates the question of whether people are “ready” to receive it.

George H. W. Bush launched his “thousand points of light” volunteer program in 1989 to encourage voluntarism like that seen in food pantries. George W. Bush, in 2002, continued that legacy, saying, “My call . . . is for every American to commit at least two years, 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime, to the service of your neighbors and your nation.” While the president declared the importance of volunteering, his advisor Grover Norquist spoke of shrinking government small enough that he could “drown it in the bathtub.”33 The conservative celebration of volunteers aligns with the policy goal of destruction of the social safety net. The more private citizens volunteer, the less the government has to spend.

As Louisiana environmental justice advocate Monique Harden noted to me, when George W. Bush visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he came dressed casually, with his sleeves rolled up, and posed for a photo-op helping rebuild a house. While this may have read like a commitment to rebuild the city, it actually sent a very different message: the rebuilding of the devastated Gulf Coast was not a government obligation but an individual burden. The president would chip in as a volunteer and hammer some nails, but the full resources of the U.S. government would not be required. The president showing up at a volunteer site was a public relations tool to put a kind face on this cruel philosophy. “A conservative recovery agenda,” said Harden, “means not everyone gets to recover.”

It’s also worth noting that the most valuable “charity” work never makes it onto anyone’s resume. It’s the mutual aid that oppressed communities show each other as they help each other survive. This work rarely makes it onto resumes or into the news or in tax deductions, but it is part of most poor people’s daily struggle.

A lack of structural analysis on the part of nonprofits didn’t just happen; it was the result of deliberate planning by the wealthy and powerful. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence make this point in their crucial book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which thoroughly examines the ways in which movements and charities have their agendas set by the wealthy who fund them, rather than by the poor and working class people they claim to serve.34 For example, prioritizing the funding of policy and legal reform rather than organizing, to redirect “activist efforts from radical change to social reform,” writes author and scholar Andrea Smith in the book’s introduction. Even funding leadership development is a tool to keep power hierarchically controlled by elites within oppressed communities and to have influence over those elites.

INCITE’s use of the term non-profit industrial complex deliberately references prison industrial complex, the term for the interconnected web of government and corporate interests that perpetuate mass incarceration, surveillance, and state violence. “While the PIC [prison industrial complex] overtly represses dissent the NPIC [non-profit industrial complex] manages and controls dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus,” writes Smith. “Essentially, foundations provide a cover for white supremacy. . . . People of color deserve individual relief but people of color organized to end white supremacy become a menace to society.”35

This nonprofit industrial complex pushes competition within our movements. If there is an organization based in the community we want to work in, doing the work we want to do, we are not taught to find ways to support them. Instead we are taught to see that organization as an obstacle.

“The idea that these same elite institutions that are invested in maintaining capitalism are going to be the ones that produce the knowledge that solves poverty is very much what philanthropy invests in,” says Dean Spade, the founder of Sylvia Rivera Law Project. “That’s who runs philanthropy, that’s who gives to philanthropy, and that’s who is employed, as program officers, often as foundation heads.”36 Often these foundations directly employ family members of the wealthy person who started it, paying more in salaries than they give away—another way that the wealth is kept in the same circles.

From their positions of wealth and power, the foundations attach conditions to their generosity, often dictating what social movements will look like and what goals they will pursue. Radical redistribution of wealth, for example, might be seen as “unrealistic” and therefore not worthy of funding. Instead these wealthy benefactors might encourage the recipients of their largesse not to seek a change in tax law that would eliminate the exception enjoyed by foundations. This happened in 2009, when President Obama proposed lowering the cap on tax deductions for charitable contributions from 50 percent of income to 28 percent, the level it was at during the Reagan administration. Foundations and nonprofits formed a united front to fight the proposal.37

Spade notes that U.S. nonprofits have corrupted movements by demanding non-systemic changes and upholding a status quo. “Through the rise of the nonprofit form, certain logics that support criminalization, militarization and wealth disparity have penetrated and transformed spaces that were once locations of fomenting resistance to state violence,” he says. “Increasingly, neoliberalism means that social issues taken up by nonprofits are separated from a broader commitment to social justice; nonprofits take part in producing and maintaining a racialized-gendered maldistribution of life chances while pursuing their ‘good work.’”38

Spade sees this shift in many post-1970s movements. “The analytical frameworks of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on broad, population-level disparities, [were] replaced by individual discrimination-based understandings of racism, homophobia, ableism, and sexism, both in law and popular culture,” he writes. “The result, thus far, has been legal reforms that mostly maintain—and often bolster—systems of maldistribution and control in the name of equality, individuality, and even diversity.”39 The kind of reform led by those who have privilege does not offer real change. It uses buzzwords like diversity and may address individual complaints, but leaves the cause of the problems untouched, even unmentioned.

Aside from foundation funding, how do movements lose a focus on systemic change? The post-1970s period saw a dropoff in radicalism among nonprofit workers and union members during a period in which communist and socialist groups saw a drop in membership—both from disillusionment among their members and from massive state repression that imprisoned movement leaders. While these revolutionary organizations also had internal conflicts or contradictions, they did help keep an anticapitalist analysis front and center. At the same time that this foregrounding of alternatives to capitalism disappeared, neoliberal economics pushed hours higher and wages lower, while stranding more young people in debt and leaving people with less free time for activism and more fear caused by precarious economic conditions.

The savior’s behavior is raced and gendered and classed. Hollywood teaches us to cheer for the lone hero riding in to save the day. People with race and gender privilege are taught by white supremacy and patriarchy that they have a certain authority to impart to the world. As Sarah Hagi has written, “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.”40

The social myth of the savior leads to reflexive praise of police, soldiers, and prosecutors. We use “fighting crime” as a synonym for doing good and “getting help” as a synonym for calling the police. Neighborhoods are called “good” when they lose their diversity and “safe” when the original inhabitants feel unsafe.41 Systemic abuses are ignored or characterized as aberrations within a system intended for good. Those who abuse from positions of power are viewed bad apples. When police kill another young Black man, we say that the criminal justice system isn’t working instead of noting that it is working just the way it was constructed. The lack of popular outlets for systemic solutions also affects many people without privilege. It can push working-class people to join the army or become police out of a genuine desire to help people, making them further invested in systems of violence and control.

From a young age, children are told that change comes from saviors, not mass movements. Students are mostly taught the “great man” theory of history—a simplistic ­nineteenth-century idea popularized by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in 1840 that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.”42 In this view, President Lincoln ended slavery, while the revolts led by enslaved people are rarely mentioned. Benevolent capitalists, rather than struggles of organized labor, are responsible for the gains of working people. The civil rights movement won victories due to the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. (or perhaps by some combination of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), not because of the millions of unnamed Black people who struggled and died for liberation.

Students are certainly not taught that slavery did not end—that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed slavery to continue if one was convicted of a crime—or that the central accomplishments of the civil rights movement have been slowly chipped away, as rights to vote and equal education are “reformed” away by voter ID laws and underfunded school districts.43

Karl Marx critiqued this view of history back in 1846. “Civil society is the true source and theatre of all history,” he wrote, “and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.”44 Or, as Howard Zinn wrote, the “power of the people on top 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 engage in the hard work of building accountability to others and ourselves. This book maps a path from the savior mentality to shared liberation.