All the White Dudes
30th July 2024
The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is in full swing, and in keeping with the Democrats’ safe space neo-segregationist principles, it organized a series of mass Zoom calls oriented to different demographic groups. Inspired by a supposedly organic gathering of 90,000 black women on Zoom, other “identity groups” wanted in, with conclaves planned for “Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women, and white men.” Not wishing to intrude on anyone’s curated spaces, I logged on to “White Dudes for Harris” on Monday night to see what the Harris campaign was asking of me and 100 million other white American men.
The moderator of the event was a scraggly-bearded and top-knotted Democrat political operative called Ross Morales Rocketto, who kicked off the meeting by “addressing the elephant in the room,” namely the problematic nature of an assembly of white men, “because throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on.” Rocketto explained that “masculinity as a trope has been coopted by the MAGA Right into something that feeds into the loneliness epidemic,” leading ultimately to destructive behaviors.
Rocketto introduced the evening’s introductory speaker who, unsurprisingly, was black. Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, served as a kind of validator, reassuring anyone concerned about an all-white gathering of men that he “represents millions of members who come from all ethnicities, including a lot of white dudes.” Mitchell cautioned that “white nationalists in MAGA want to speak for you,” and the failure to denounce them signals our acceptance. “Don’t allow this fringe cult to speak for you,” he urged us, but stand up “in the spirit of solidarity” with Kamala Harris and “get in formation with the forces uniting against fascism.”