Much has been written in the past few months about the gender gap in this year’s election.
Polling shows a majority of men support former President Donald Trump and a majority of women support Vice President Kamala Harris.
While numerous stories in the past week or so have focused on the rising popularity of Trump among younger Black and Latino men, the real wind beneath Trump’s wings comes from white men, who support Trump over Harris 58% to 35%, CNN reported in late September.
I wrote about the two campaigns’ contrasting approaches to masculinity in September, and afterward, a reader named Chris Crass reached out to share the work he and others had been doing to organize and mobilize white men to elect the first woman president.
Inspired by the grassroots effort Win With Black Women, Crass, of Louisville, Ky., started White Men Against MAGA shortly after Harris stepped into the race in July. After decades of progressive organizing and movement-building work, Crass saw a need and opportunity for white men across the country to step up to organize other white men for Harris.
Building off white anti-racist organizing and the work of SURJ, or Standing Up for Racial Justice, Crass and others wanted to shift the narrative around the “exceptional white guy” who is the unicorn in progressive multiracial spaces to a much broader, base-building approach.
“We want large numbers. We want tons of white guys to be involved in this work,” Crass said. “We don’t want 100 exceptional white guys around the country. We want tens of thousands of white guys that are actively part of positive justice movements and values.”
For now, Crass said White Men Against MAGA’s goal was to bring 150 white men into voter contact work, phone banking and canvassing to do outreach to hundreds of thousands of voters.
Crass said many white people have never been exposed to anti-racist and racial justice values and just being out there and speaking as white men to other white men can be a powerful demonstration of what is possible.
In progressive spaces, there is often a belief that white men should take a back seat and support the leadership of people of color. This sentiment is grounded in reaction to the very real history of women of color, in particular, doing much of the heavy lifting in social justice spaces and then being taken for granted and their leadership sidelined and dismissed.
But what ends up happening, Crass said, is that white men end up not shouldering their part of the load.
One group member told Crass he realized he had become too comfortable taking a step back. He didn’t have to take risks, put himself on the line or do the emotional labor of getting his hands dirty to make real change.
“The guys that have internalized and tried to practice this kind of stepping back, they’re not developing their leadership,” Crass said. “They’re not developing their abilities to be persuasive” when they try to organize other white men into social change work.
Mike Beebe is a Seattle facilitator and trainer and a member of White Men Against MAGA. He, too, has been active in anti-racist organizing for decades.
He said what the work comes down to is that white men “need to show up as partners for social justice and know that it’s going to benefit us too,” meaning working toward racial or social justice is not a “service” to others but actions that create the world that better serves everyone.
Through his work with White Men Against MAGA, Beebe helps on the technical side of phone banks and makes calls himself. His calls have been mostly to undecided white voters in Nevada, and he has been “pleasantly surprised” at the connections he has made with people on the other end of the phone.
In one election outreach session that included volunteers from SURJ and White Men Against MAGA, for example, Beebe said 160 volunteers had over 1,300 conversations out of 80,000 calls attempted — in just an hour and a half.
While Beebe might have been calling Nevada voters, he said there is plenty of work to go around in our region as well. “There are all kinds of issues right here that white men need to be working on and are needed in the movement to work on,” he said.
Crass said it’s important for progressive white men in liberal places like Seattle to resist the idea that they have everything figured out and their main job is to call out other white men who they feel are less woke than they are.
“We have a responsibility as progressives to really talk with people, connect with people and talk about our values in a way that’s going to resonate,” he said. “Because systems of oppression would love it for people in Seattle to look down on others.”