I agree -- try broadening the audience you market the party to.
Why couldn’t it have been for all dudes?
By Tyler Austin Harper
www.theatlantic.com
The White Dudes for Harris group call sounded like a very bad idea. The group’s organizer, Ross Morales Rocketto, acknowledged as much when he kicked off the video fundraiser—which featured Jeff Bridges, Mark Hamill, and other celebrities, as well as a spate of vice-presidential hopefuls—Monday night. “Throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” Morales Rocketto said.
My sentiments exactly. I’m generally hostile to any form of racial identitarianism, and I’ve spent the past few years watching—and criticizing—liberals as they’ve peddled condescending, divisive, and often bizarre rhetoric in the name of “anti-racism,” fighting sexism, and generally militating for progress. I thought the event would be the kind of thing that played well with the college-educated voters who already make up the Democratic base, but that might repel the swing-state and working-class men the party needs to court in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.
So imagine my shock when I found myself, slowly but surely, charmed by the White Dudes for Harris call. Morales Rocketto tugged at my heartstrings with a story about male suicide and his simple observation that “there is a crisis of loneliness in this country.” His plainspoken opening set the tone for the entire affair, where speakers fluctuated among earnest (dads, straight and gay, talking about what IVF meant to them), jocular (far too many jokes about J. D. Vance, couches, and dolphins), and wonkish (an unexpectedly sober and comprehensive rundown of Vice President Kamala Harris’s accomplishments courtesy of the comedian Paul Scheer). Labor rights came up again and again.
Xochitl Gonzalez: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand
But the more I realized I was enjoying the event, delighted by the kind of frank, sharp-toothed talk that Democrats rarely permit themselves to indulge in, the less I was persuaded by its supposed raison d’être. There was little to be gained by framing the call as an event for white men rather than for men in general—the Democrats have a problem with appealing to male voters that cuts across racial lines. The “White Dudes” name risks solidifying the public’s impression that the Democratic Party is for overeducated elites with laptop jobs and performative progressive politics, which is particularly shortsighted at a moment when the GOP is on its way to achieving a multiracial working-class coalition, cobbled together with increasing shares of Black and Hispanic voters driven by male defections from the Democratic coalition. The way to contest this trend is not through bizarre rituals of racial balkanization but by reasserting a commitment to the kind of liberal universalism that lifts up all Americans.
The White Dudes call was the latest in a series of identity-based video-call fundraisers for Harris. Jump-started by a Black Women for Harris Zoom event last week, which was followed by a corresponding fundraiser organized by Black men, things took a stranger and more scrutinized turn after a recent White Women for Kamala event provided plenty of cringey discourse fodder, fueling discussions about the role that white identity groups should play in progressive politics. By the time the White Dudes for Harris Zoom was announced, the practice of racially siloed video calls was already ginning up debate and being cast as a liberal version of segregation.
Many non-white-dude writers were quick to joke about whether they would be allowed into the virtual fundraiser if they tried to enter. The journalist Zaid Jilani quipped: “Can I join the White Dudes for Harris call? Do I have to prove I’m white, like I need to dance to Phish or splash some Tabasco on boiled broccoli and then start sweating and heaving after I eat it?” The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang tweeted, “Oh shit I made it through security,” accompanied a screenshot of his RSVP to the event, while I made a similar joke about using subterfuge to sneak onto the call. Shadi Hamid of The Washington Post laid out the more serious question underlying all this uneasy banter: “Maybe I missed the memo but when did white affinity groups become an okay thing on the left?”
In the face of this mounting skepticism, defenders of the Zoom hammered one talking point again and again—“everyone is welcome!”—but this assertion felt faintly preposterous. After all, events that are open to everyone generally do not signal said openness by singling out a particular racial demographic in their very name. If a grocery store was named Natural Foods for White Guys but a small sign was placed in the window that read “But everyone is allowed in!,” how seriously would we be expected to take this reassurance?
Marketing materials put out in advance by White Dudes for Harris did little to allay my concerns. The organization’s “social media toolkit,” passed along to me by an acquaintance, provides a list of “message points” for supporters of the event. Couched in the kind of therapy-speak that has become endemic to the liberal professional class, the flyer is rife with social-justice jargon, including invocations of male “toxic entitlement” and exhortations to create “spaces of honesty and trust.” Thinking of the blue-collar white men I grew up around in central Pennsylvania—the kind of place Democrats desperately need to win—I found it impossible to believe that many of them would be moved by that kind of language. I sent the toolkit to two left-leaning white male friends who grew up working-class to see if they had a similar reaction: One responded “Oh my
Why couldn’t it have been for all dudes?
By Tyler Austin Harper
![www.theatlantic.com](/proxy.php?image=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.theatlantic.com%2Fthumbor%2F9pWpL67RxSfJtncVrXj2rggvO-g%3D%2F0x0%3A4792x2496%2F1200x625%2Fmedia%2Fimg%2Fmt%2F2024%2F07%2Fwhitedudesforkamala%2Foriginal.jpg&hash=875e0d3301e77e17d1d99eef80ca2d8b&return_error=1)
‘White Dudes for Harris’ Was a Missed Opportunity
Why couldn’t it have been for all dudes?
The White Dudes for Harris group call sounded like a very bad idea. The group’s organizer, Ross Morales Rocketto, acknowledged as much when he kicked off the video fundraiser—which featured Jeff Bridges, Mark Hamill, and other celebrities, as well as a spate of vice-presidential hopefuls—Monday night. “Throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” Morales Rocketto said.
My sentiments exactly. I’m generally hostile to any form of racial identitarianism, and I’ve spent the past few years watching—and criticizing—liberals as they’ve peddled condescending, divisive, and often bizarre rhetoric in the name of “anti-racism,” fighting sexism, and generally militating for progress. I thought the event would be the kind of thing that played well with the college-educated voters who already make up the Democratic base, but that might repel the swing-state and working-class men the party needs to court in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.
So imagine my shock when I found myself, slowly but surely, charmed by the White Dudes for Harris call. Morales Rocketto tugged at my heartstrings with a story about male suicide and his simple observation that “there is a crisis of loneliness in this country.” His plainspoken opening set the tone for the entire affair, where speakers fluctuated among earnest (dads, straight and gay, talking about what IVF meant to them), jocular (far too many jokes about J. D. Vance, couches, and dolphins), and wonkish (an unexpectedly sober and comprehensive rundown of Vice President Kamala Harris’s accomplishments courtesy of the comedian Paul Scheer). Labor rights came up again and again.
Xochitl Gonzalez: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand
But the more I realized I was enjoying the event, delighted by the kind of frank, sharp-toothed talk that Democrats rarely permit themselves to indulge in, the less I was persuaded by its supposed raison d’être. There was little to be gained by framing the call as an event for white men rather than for men in general—the Democrats have a problem with appealing to male voters that cuts across racial lines. The “White Dudes” name risks solidifying the public’s impression that the Democratic Party is for overeducated elites with laptop jobs and performative progressive politics, which is particularly shortsighted at a moment when the GOP is on its way to achieving a multiracial working-class coalition, cobbled together with increasing shares of Black and Hispanic voters driven by male defections from the Democratic coalition. The way to contest this trend is not through bizarre rituals of racial balkanization but by reasserting a commitment to the kind of liberal universalism that lifts up all Americans.
The White Dudes call was the latest in a series of identity-based video-call fundraisers for Harris. Jump-started by a Black Women for Harris Zoom event last week, which was followed by a corresponding fundraiser organized by Black men, things took a stranger and more scrutinized turn after a recent White Women for Kamala event provided plenty of cringey discourse fodder, fueling discussions about the role that white identity groups should play in progressive politics. By the time the White Dudes for Harris Zoom was announced, the practice of racially siloed video calls was already ginning up debate and being cast as a liberal version of segregation.
Many non-white-dude writers were quick to joke about whether they would be allowed into the virtual fundraiser if they tried to enter. The journalist Zaid Jilani quipped: “Can I join the White Dudes for Harris call? Do I have to prove I’m white, like I need to dance to Phish or splash some Tabasco on boiled broccoli and then start sweating and heaving after I eat it?” The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang tweeted, “Oh shit I made it through security,” accompanied a screenshot of his RSVP to the event, while I made a similar joke about using subterfuge to sneak onto the call. Shadi Hamid of The Washington Post laid out the more serious question underlying all this uneasy banter: “Maybe I missed the memo but when did white affinity groups become an okay thing on the left?”
In the face of this mounting skepticism, defenders of the Zoom hammered one talking point again and again—“everyone is welcome!”—but this assertion felt faintly preposterous. After all, events that are open to everyone generally do not signal said openness by singling out a particular racial demographic in their very name. If a grocery store was named Natural Foods for White Guys but a small sign was placed in the window that read “But everyone is allowed in!,” how seriously would we be expected to take this reassurance?
Marketing materials put out in advance by White Dudes for Harris did little to allay my concerns. The organization’s “social media toolkit,” passed along to me by an acquaintance, provides a list of “message points” for supporters of the event. Couched in the kind of therapy-speak that has become endemic to the liberal professional class, the flyer is rife with social-justice jargon, including invocations of male “toxic entitlement” and exhortations to create “spaces of honesty and trust.” Thinking of the blue-collar white men I grew up around in central Pennsylvania—the kind of place Democrats desperately need to win—I found it impossible to believe that many of them would be moved by that kind of language. I sent the toolkit to two left-leaning white male friends who grew up working-class to see if they had a similar reaction: One responded “Oh my
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