Organizing ‘white dudes’ for Harris - or anyone else: Is that such a great idea? | Opinion

When white men get together to explicitly organize as “white dudes,” one way or the other, sooner or later, bad things are going to happen.

It didn’t take long for “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” to start looking shady. Of all people to start it, the famously fresh and friendly Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argued that men should support Harris because she’ll keep abortion legal. How that’s valuable to Pete and his partner, I don’t know, but the argument that “men are more free when abortion is legal” has to be among the most tone-deaf I’ve ever heard come from someone held up as an example of an enlightened male.

Depending on which peer-reviewed research you believe, somewhere between 5% and 60% of abortions happen because women are pressured into them by the fathers of those unborn children. Say it is on the low end at 20% — that’s more than 100,000 abortions a year because women were pressured into getting them.

That’s not freedom and it certainly isn’t choice. The men who are freer when abortion is legal are the worst among us, guys like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, who see women as prey and vows as optional.

Ick. The millions in campaign contributions white men raised for Democratic presidential aspirant Harris can’t make up for it.

But that boorishness is just a taste of what’s to come if white guys start thinking of themselves as a class and organizing around their white guyness. There’s a reason we have a taboo in our society against white men organizing as explicitly white male groups.

Why stop at white? Why not exclude all but Christians? And not the Catholic kind either. Protestant Christian white dudes famously organized with white robes and pointy hats and burning crosses. There was intimidation and riots and lynchings, what wonderful memories we have of organized white males organizing around their whiteness.

And it is not like you have to go back that far in time or ideologically. It was only 14 years ago that the last “exalted cyclops” of the KKK to serve in the Senate died. He, like Buttigieg, was a lifelong Democrat.

It was only seven years ago, and but a stone’s throw from Robert Byrd’s West Virginia, that a decidedly pale group of protesters marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, at a white nationalist rally where a young woman was killed. At the time, most good people thought groups of white men organizing was a bad idea.

Now, I am not really, seriously comparing Pete Buttigieg and his taupe-hued cohorts to the Klan. They, after all, are the good kind of people organizing to elect a mixed-race child of immigrants as president, an event that would have made the younger Robert Byrd turn red with rage.

But there’s a reason we look sideways when white men organize explicitly as white men. Once the social cost of doing so openly goes down the other side will do it, too. How long do we have to wait for the Mississippi chapter of White Men for Trump/Vance to announce their new group? How long before the Proud Boys of Charlottesville and Jan. 6 fame move their recruitment from out of the internet shadows and into the real-world middle schools? Will those events be benign?

If you want to organize white men, or just white people on behalf of progressive candidates, do it with a nod to their continued social dominance, but leave the door open to others, too. CEOs for Harris would have a few Black and women members, but would otherwise be made up overwhelmingly of white men. Union members for Harris would be more diverse, but still overwhelmingly light in color. Eagle Scouts for Harris? Silicon Valley for Harris? Iowans for Harris? Idaho bowling leagues for Harris? All get white people together to support Harris without making it OK for white people to organize along racial lines.

We Americans have spent the better part of two centuries getting over the racial divide built by white people excluding others from the benefits of American liberty. We ought not be taking steps backward now, even if it does make for a cool Zoom call and help Kamala Harris get into the White House.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com

This story was originally published August 1, 2024 at 4:08 AM with the headline "Organizing ‘white dudes’ for Harris - or anyone else: Is that such a great idea? | Opinion."