Читать книгу No More Heroes - Jordan Flaherty - Страница 7

I met Brandon Darby in New Orleans in 2004. He was ­twenty-eight, with a widow’s peak, a dimple on his chin, and a cool confidence that belied an intense passion when he got worked up. We talked about Palestinian rights, and he immed­iately expressed his support for anti-colonial armed resistance. He wanted me to know that he was ready to die for the cause of revolution. He also talked about his friendship with Robert King, who had been one of three imprisoned Black Panthers at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, collectively known as the Angola Three. King had spent twenty-nine years in soli­tary confinement for a crime he did not commit, was freed in 2001, and eventually moved to Austin, Texas, where Darby lived. Darby told me the militants of the civil rights and Black Power movements inspired him.

Reading the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Assata Shakur radicalized me as a young activist, and as Darby talked about the Black Panthers and Palestinian freedom struggles while smoking cigarettes and drinking a beer he projected a white working-class cool that appealed to me. He had a compelling pattern of speech, expressing radical ideas about revolution or imperialism as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He would emphasize his passion through repetition, saying quietly, “There’s something wrong with a system that would allow this to happen, you know? There’s something wrong.” He would pause at a common word or phrase, as if offering to define it for you. “The FBI was afraid of the Panthers’ free breakfast program,” he might say. “You know, breakfast?”

Darby was visiting New Orleans and talking about moving there from Austin. That didn’t happen, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. Then, less than a year later, New Orleans was submerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Darby was back.

His story of returning to New Orleans quickly became legend. He had come in a car with scott crow, an anarchist activist also from Austin. They had come to rescue Robert King. Darby had taken a boat to Robert King’s house, faced down state troopers who got in his way, and rescued King from his house. “I knew I had to save King’s life, and I wasn’t going to let federal authorities or the New Orleans police force stop me,” he later said.1 Then he and crow went to the Algiers neighborhood, where they helped former Black Panther Malik Rahim face down armed white vigilantes. Robert King later disputed elements of this story, but by then the legend had taken on a life of its own.

Darby quickly became a leader of Common Ground, an anarchist-leaning volunteer group that brought thousands of young, mostly white volunteers in to work on rebuilding New Orleans. Founded by Rahim, his partner Sharon Johnson, Darby, and crow, Common Ground began with a well-informed critique of the massive failures of the Red Cross and other aid agencies.2 Their defined goal was to support local control of the recovery. Their slogan was “Solidarity, Not Charity.” From the beginning, Darby was impatient with the non-hierarchical organizing style many of the founders and volunteers came with. “For some, Common Ground might have been about creating a little anarchist utopia,” he later said. “For me, it was about helping people have their rights heard and have their homes [restored], and it was about getting things done.”3

This period in New Orleans crystallized the idea of the savior for me. It is not just about Brandon Darby but also about the people who followed him. Darby is not so much a prototypical savior as he is the kind of dangerous person who can rise to power when we are seeking saviors. Tens of thousands of people came to New Orleans to save the city, and too many were uninterested in listening or learning. I heard again and again, “There was no organizing here before we came here.” Or, “We’re going to teach the people here about resistance.” A city with hundreds of years of history of resistance to white supremacy faced the indignity of being “taught” how to organize by an endless stream of privileged white twenty-year-olds.

In the first two years, for many who had come to New Orleans to save the city and its people, Darby was like a cult leader. Young volunteers would hang on his every word. He always seemed to be dating several beautiful, idealistic, ­college-aged activist women. With Darby’s example, post-Katrina relief was almost a contest of machismo: who could gut houses faster, stay longer in housing without electricity and running water, stand up to police, and lead the Black masses to justice? Scholar Rachel Luft, who worked to support feminist and anti­racist responses among volunteers, described this attitude as disaster masculinity.4

When the city released a planning blueprint that called for the flooded Lower Ninth Ward to be bulldozed and left as a green space, Darby moved into an empty house in the neighborhood and announced that he was going to stay there to represent all the residents who had been displaced, standing against demolitions until the rightful owners could return. “If I’d had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people,” he said later, declaring that he’d bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: “There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents.”5

In a time when most New Orleanians were displaced, Darby’s leadership position in Common Ground gave him a platform for media attention. There was a story on Nightline; Academy Award–winning director Jonathan Demme filmed a profile of him; he was featured on the Tavis Smiley Show, in documentaries, and on local and international TV and radio. Although Darby had no roots in the city or experience, he had rushed into a vacuum and became an internationally known voice of New Orleans. The influx of Common Ground volunteers, many of whom brought media connections from around the United States, helped Darby to grab the spotlight. He took advantage of journalists not up for doing the work to find the authentic voices of the affected communities of New Orleans. Everyone seemed to be enamored by the story of the charismatic white savior.

Darby represented what I think of as the classic tendency of the savior, a sort of leftist version of Manifest Destiny, where a person acts as if he is destined to lead the struggle of poor people, who implicitly are unqualified to lead their own struggle. Darby was always leading in their name. “I don’t think I want to be a hero any more than someone who’s a firefighter. Are they firefighters because they want to be [heroes]?” Darby later asked a reporter. “Some people are really good with numbers, and they’re accountants. My brain thinks of ways to fix things I think are wrong.”6

Darby was a polarizing figure from the beginning. Many New Orleans organizers were convinced by his disruptive presence that Darby was paid by the federal government to bring dissent to the movement. Even Malik Rahim’s own son was suspicious. “It came to the degree that my son just knew that there was something too wrong with Brandon, and he searched Brandon’s possessions, because he said, ‘This guy is an agent, or he is an informant,’” Rahim said later. “And, let me tell you, it caused a rift between my son and I, so much so that eventually, he left. Because I believed Brandon. I defended him.”7

These concerns were well-founded. Rahim lived through COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which utilized agents and informants to spy on and sabotage movements from 1956 though the operation’s exposure in 1971.8 The FBI’s paid informant program has grown dramatically since the days of COINTELPRO, with the number of informants rising from 1,500 in 1975 to 15,000 in 2011. While COINTELPRO focused on the civil rights and Black power movements, today the FBI uses undercover agents and paid informants in a range of movements, with the majority apparently focused on Muslim communities. From 2001 to 2011, almost half of all terrorism prosecutions involved the use of a paid informant.9 In many of these cases, lawyers and advocates have found that the so-called “terrorists” were confused young men, often with mental disabilities, limited intelligence, emotional problems, or desperate life situations who were manipulated by the informant into agreeing to actions they had previously shown no interest in.10

By this time, Darby was already having conversations with the police. In December 2005 he told a reporter that he had “the New Orleans Police Department’s hierarchy on speed dial” and had regular meetings with police.11 Local organizers condemned his provocative behavior, but his leadership position in Common Ground shielded him from accountability.

In the tense post-Katrina era, Darby seemed to be encouraging conflict between different activists and organizations doing reconstruction work. When organizers from the local chapter of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence announced that they were opening a women’s health clinic, Darby announced his own clinic, and with his higher profile was able to secure funding that might otherwise have gone to the local, women of color–led effort.

Darby’s friend crow (in an action he later said Darby pushed him to take) wrote a brutal letter attacking People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, a coalition of Black-led organizations active in the city, further causing conflict among local organizers. Lily Keber, one of the many new arrivals to New Orleans who dated Darby in 2006, told me that even when Darby was in a bar, “there would always be fights near him. He would never be in the fight, but it was always between two people he had just been talking to.”

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a touchstone in social justice history in this country. Tens of thousands of volunteers came to help rebuild the city. In one month, during spring break 2006, about two thousand five hundred volunteers passed through Common Ground, most of them staying in a gutted schoolhouse in the Upper Ninth Ward and washing in outdoor showers. When volunteers saw the devastation in mostly Black areas, while white areas were receiving aid and recovering quickly, and when they saw Black-led organized resistance to this unequal recovery, it was a transformative, inspiring experience. Like the protests in Ferguson nearly ten years later, it was a moment of awakening that spread virally across the United States.

But there were also problems in that gutted schoolhouse: an epidemic of sexual assault, committed by young white males against female and transgender volunteers. And Darby had helped foster a macho culture that dismissed the complaints. “He kicked in the door of a trailer where there were volunteers with guns on them. He did a lot of Wild West shit—Mister Macho Action Hero,” says Lisa Fithian, an early leader of Common Ground who was driven out by Darby. For Fithian, there was obvious misogyny involved in the blind support for Darby. “A lot of women had been hurt by this man, and a lot of men had defended him over the years, and it’s not okay,” she says.12 Other people in the organization’s leadership followed Darby’s example. In the macho atmosphere he fostered, talk of patriarchy or sexual assault was seen as a distraction.

At one point, allegations appeared online that Darby had sexually assaulted volunteers. His then-friend Common Ground cofounder scott crow worked to take the online postings down. “I used my connections with Indymedia all around the world to take it down, on server after server after server, because Brandon asked me to,” he said later. “I still stand by that, because you know, no physical person ever came forward, and no advocate for a physical person ever came forward and said, ‘He physically assaulted me.’”13