I signed on to the call last night and was bumped to the YouTube stream. I sent money and watched for 40 minutes—a long enough time, I figured, to be counted.
On the subject of organizing and taking action as a group of white dudes, it wasn’t terrible—I never cringed—but it was lacking.
This is fraught territory.
From the New York Times:
Before Monday’s call, Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic organizer who helped start the group, acknowledged the discomfort some might feel about the group’s name.
“I don’t blame them,” he said in an interview. “Throughout American history, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that when white men organize, it’s often with pointy hats on, and it doesn’t end well.”
“What we are really trying to do is engage a group of people that the left has largely ignored for the last few years,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “There’s a silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA Republicans, and we haven’t done anything to try to capture those votes.”
This is not terrible, but it isn’t revealing or insightful, either. Rocketto acknowledges the underlying discomfort, but the words he uses to assuage that discomfort are inaccurate and not completely honest.
Take any left venue—say, Daily Kos. Are white men largely ignored? Hardly. In politics, white men are the object of political persuasion, disproportionate to their actual numbers, the same way white men are disproportionately the object of any other kind of messaging, just about anywhere. That’s how dominance works.
That acknowledgement a good place to start.
The next step, I think, is to investigate what special political roles and responsibilities accrue to those of us who, by chance of birth, are on the dominant side.
The first lesson of being a white dude leftist is to step back, to be aware that one is holding a louder megaphone, and free up space for others to step forward. But that’s not what we’re getting at with a “White Dudes for Harris” group. This is a space, in fact, to step forward.
To what end?
I think that doesn’t have a fair answer, a complete enough answer, without acknowledging the social construction, the unreality, of our whiteness—and even, for that matter, our maleness as we know it. Our ultimate objective is to annihilate our white, male identity. That’s a radical concept for most people, but without it, I’m going to continue to be uncomfortable being a “White Dude for…” anything.
Because what I really want to say to fellow white dudes, whether they are my fellow progressives, or the legions of the uninformed and uninvolved, or the nutty MAGA types, is this:
The old world was built around the white patriarchy, around imperialist domination, sexual domination, exploitation and destruction of nature. Now that old world has to die, because as long as power accrues on that basis, the horrors of inequality and war will go on, right up until the time the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. We have to change.
But more than that. When we white dudes give up our white, male identity and the privileges that go with it, in part or in whole, individually or collectively… whenever we do that, even a little bit, we make ourselves individually more free, and we make our fellow white dudes more free, and we make everyone else more free.
I don’t pretend that is easy, or that it’s obvious how to do it or when to do it in each aspect of our political lives and our everyday lives. Sometimes its difficult to defend one’s humanity—to set boundaries and to pursue aspirations that every human being deserves to keep and to have—without invoking the identity that has been given to us. But we can try to be aware of the differences between our universal rights on the one hand and our special privileges on the other.
What I do know is that when I do it—when I do yield and fold under my special status as a white dude—I feel more empowered, not less. I feel more able—not less—to provide, to protect, to guide, to watch over. I am more of a man for it.
And maybe working to make a Black woman President can be part of that experience.
And I know that I want to spread the word about that.
