## Metadata - Author: [[Jordan Flaherty]] - Full Title: No More Heroes - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([Location 223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=223)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=229)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=248)) - Tags: [[blue]] - (“Intersectionality” refers to a way of looking at interlocking identities and oppressions and was coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989). ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=255)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=259)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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, ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=264)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=276)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=281)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=284)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=296)) - Tags: [[blue]] - True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes that nourish false charity.” ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=306)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=308)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=317)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=328)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=342)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=396)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=453)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=461)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=475)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=490)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=504)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “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 wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.1 ([Location 528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=528)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Whether it’s aid for rebuilding in Haiti, human rights advocacy in Palestine, or hunting warlords in Africa, there is ample reason to be suspicious of gifts from wealthier nations. If the aid does not address the structural issues that create injustice, then it only creates a more stable status quo, locking injustice into place. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=799)) - Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=975)) - Rebecca Solnit has written, “The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. It is a tendency of journalism to focus on what changed yesterday rather than ask what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo.”2 ([Location 1241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=1241)) - We have over seven million people in prison, jail, probation or parole, by far the largest prison population on the planet. Twenty-five percent of all prisoners in the world are in U.S. prisons. ([Location 2719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=2719)) - Norris Henderson spent twenty-seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit. While in prison, his son was murdered. Norris shared that he wanted revenge on the man who killed his son. But, he added, “In a fair and just society, you can’t create laws based on how you feel at the worst moment of your life.” ([Location 2728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LY1IHSX&location=2728))