“It’s time for white men to have a Black woman’s back.”
White men are coming out, but not in the way you might think. Before more than 190,000 men joined a “White Dudes for Harris” call on July 29, the common wisdom in the media suggested that most white men support extreme right causes and candidates. Not so fast.
“We’re taking white men back from the MAGA movement,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of White Dudes for Harris, at the start of a three-hour telethon that raised more than $4 million for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. “By our silence, we white men have allowed white nationalists to speak for us.”
That white men organized is among the many notable shifts in the 2024 presidential campaign since VP Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.
For decades, white men’s activism and engagement in progressive causes has been consistently under the radar, obscured by extreme right-wing men’s gangs, from the Proud Boys to the Aryan Brotherhood. At the same time, white men’s silence has perpetuated the belief that virtually all white men feel aggrieved, are antifeminist and are JD Vance mini-me’s.
The truth is, for 50 years there has been a growing cohort of men supporting women’s efforts to achieve gender equality—from supporting women’s reproductive rights to decrying domestic violence. Critics have used the labels of a “profeminist” or “antisexist” men’s movement to try and marginalize us. Yet, the cultural shifts in recent decades—from men showing up in droves at the Women’s March in 2017, supporting the #MeToo movement and promoting engaged fathering—paint a different picture than the one a lazy mainstream media has been relying on. It’s time for them to dig deeper, analyze and recognize the history.
White men are part of a multiracial, multicultural movement redefining manhood and masculinities. An unintended consequence of White Dudes for Harris is that white men can now walk through a portal where our voices articulating an egalitarian vision of manhood can be heard. White Dudes is inadvertently helping us put cracks in our glass ceiling.
Collectively, the two dozen speakers on the call—including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and actors Jeff Bridges and Bradley Whitford—made palpable the liberatory feelings men expressed being able to speak out as white men, and in so doing reimagine manhood. Progressive white men have often felt unseen, not sure how to come out of a closet where they’ve felt isolated from other progressive activists. White Dudes helped to open the door.
While it’s unlikely that many of the participants on the White Dudes call—including the 150,000 who signed on to volunteer for the Harris campaign—are aware of the history of the profeminist men’s movement, now that the door’s been opened, the prospects they can connect the dots on a range of pressing social issues, are unlimited.
“We aren’t going to sit around and let the MAGA crowd bully other white guys into voting for a hateful and divisive ideology,” Morales Rocketto said.
U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked viewers to think about how they might answer their children’s future question: “What did you do, Dad, to stop the MAGA movement?”
VP Harris’ national campaign co-chair and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said it’s not true that white men lose when others get ahead. Landrieu believes that if white men in swing states “show up and vote for [Vice President Harris], even 1 or 2 percentage points can make the difference.”
Whitford, featured in The Handmaid’s Tale television series, wryly addressed what he described as the rainbow of diversity among the speakers and attendees: “So many shades of beige,” the actor remarked, smiling.
But it was Tim Walz who spoke out in language Trump and his supporters would have no trouble understanding. “A Black woman is gonna kick his ass,” the Minnesota governor spat out, in a rare display of more traditional manspeak. “And Trump’s gonna have to live with that fact for the rest of his life.”
Black women have always been the backbone of the Democrats’ electoral coalition, faithfully supporting white male candidates, election after election, noted White Dudes’ cofounder, Morales Rocketto, at the end of the White Dudes marathon event. “Now it’s time for white men to have a Black woman’s back.”
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