Before more than 190,000 men joined a “White Dudes for Harris” call on July 29, the common wisdom parroted by the media was that most white men support extreme right causes and candidates. Not so fast.
“We’re taking white men back from the MAGA movement,” Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of White Dudes for Harris, declared 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—as white men—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 organizations.
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 the mainstream media has been relying on.
National Harris campaign co-chair, 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 one or two percentage points can make the difference.”
Bradley Whitford, who’s 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 said. “And Trump’s gonna have to live with that fact for the rest of his life.”
White Dudes’ co-founder Morales Rocketto noted at the end of the White Dudes marathon event, “Now it’s time for white men to have a Black woman’s back.”
Rob Okun is editor of the anthology, ‘Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.’
The world has never been black or white. Why we are suddenly dividing it into two simplistic shades, when it is much more complex and varied, as those of us who are of mixed descent know?