Organizing White Men for Social Justice: Let’s Build

With far-right movements around the world successfully organizing men against multiracial feminist democracy, there is a tremendous need for progressive men of all backgrounds to organize men. In the United States, this work is imperative.

I’m part of a growing ecosystem and network of white male leaders who want to engage as many white men and boys as possible to participate in, find belonging in, and make positive impacts with movements for racial, economic, gender, and environmental justice.¹

For the past 35 years, my focus has been on building up white antiracist vision, culture, strategy, leadership, and organization in white communities. But with the rise of the far-right, the focus on organizing white men specifically has increased.

What Progressive Organizing of White Men Requires

Elites throughout US history have used white supremacy and patriarchy to pit people against each other, a process that, of course, continues today. Growing up in a white working-class family myself, I have direct experience with how this works. The right weaponizes the economic misery, pain, and destabilization of as many as they can to gain support for an agenda that drives inequality even further. In particular, the right positions itself as the political and cultural expression of white men. And they have been successful.

To illustrate this point, I frequently ask progressives to imagine “white men coming together around issues of race, gender, and class,” and terrible images and feelings routinely come up. This includes images of Charlottesville, January 6, MAGA and Klan rallies, and billionaire oligarchs.

There is profound sadness and grief with these images, and the sense of losing white men and boys to these destructive forces, that many of us experience. For white male progressives, the sadness and grief frequently lead to shame and guilt. When I’m organizing white men, working with these feelings is an important part of the process.

Elites throughout US history have used white supremacy and patriarchy to pit people against each other.

I then work with white men to identify and lift up white men throughout history who have worked for racial, gender, and economic justice—who have been on the right side of history. Some will know names, but many won’t. We then move into stories of white men progressive leaders and mentors, to help create positive images.

We then pivot to the overarching narrative organizing strategy behind this imbalance: that supremacy systems don’t want us to know their names, don’t want us to have positive role models. To build movements, we need examples to learn from, cultural and historical resources—nourishment—that empowers and supports us to not just “suck less,” but to actually show up in positive, healthy, dynamic, and meaningful ways. We need to believe in ourselves and bring our friends and families with us—and advance collective liberation.

The Struggle to Build White Male Antiracist Infrastructure

There is a growing network of white men—and many others—who recognize that social justice movements need to create spaces for white men and boys that are nourishing, supportive, and guided by leadership that believes in them.

In the early 1990s and 2000s, these efforts included caucuses, trainings, and support groups for white men—and were usually integrated into larger progressive communities and organizations.

These were almost always in response to women challenging sexism on the left and the feminist movement calling for men to show up against misogyny and patriarchy. For example, the Against Patriarchy Men’s Group met biweekly for five years, supporting each other through the question “how do we bring antiracist feminist values” into our lives, families, and roles in our social justice efforts, and other groups like this existed.

White men’s caucuses and support groups have formed and exist in Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) chapters around the country. Then, with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, women leaders in SURJ and elsewhere encouraged white male activists to focus more on organizing white men, including forming groups specifically to create political homes that nurture their development and integrate them into ongoing racial and economic justice organizing.

Soon after, Organizing White Men for Collective Liberation (OWMCL) formed as a national network of white male activists that gathered to strategize and create more ways for white men to join progressive efforts. Through OWMCL and over a dozen similarly aligned groups, white men were exploring critical questions, such as:

• How can antiracist feminism help us grow as people and activists?
• How can we best support and join with women and BIPOC leadership to build progressive power?
• How can we bring more white men into this work?

With the uprising in 2020 in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, new efforts to organize white men emerged, including the national membership group White Men for Racial Justice, which continues to grow today. The group of well over 300 active members engages in a dynamic process for community building, leadership development, and bold action.

The training programs for white men that I’d been doing for years grew dramatically during this period. A growing number of white male leaders were participating in trainings in religious/spiritual communities, unions, multiracial community organizing, and in schools.

Additionally, responding to feedback from Black, Indigenous, and women of color leaders in nonprofits, the training program Breaking the Mold was formed to better equip white men to be leaders in equity in workplaces and communities. Over 50 white male leaders have gone through the program, and a new cohort is underway.

The past two years also saw the formation of the Perennial Sunflower Project, with the goal of “developing the field of white men’s organizing.” The group uses small retreats to build a relational organizing culture where participants share organizing experiences and lessons—and consider how to more effectively align, collaborate, and grow this work.

White Antiracism and the Harris Campaign

Back in July 2024, when Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy and Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, the Win with Black Women mass Zoom gathering kicked off an energized, frenetic organizing drive.

Two of us who had worked together for years with OWMCL and grew closer through participating in a Sunflower retreat, launched White Men Against MAGA as a collaboration between SURJ’s national electoral organizing and white men’s organizing efforts. Within a few days, we held a webinar of our own, with over 1,100 white men participating.

We knew we needed a systemic class analysis of how ruling elites use divide-and-conquer strategy.

We quickly built up and recruited an organizing core of over 100 members for White Men Against MAGA, who invited white men in their lives to also show up and phone bank, do door knocking in swing states, and do get-out-the-vote efforts in the final weeks.

Soon after, the group White Dudes for Harris launched, initiating a two-fold process. First, the group started a WhatsApp thread with at first hundreds and eventually a thousand white male organizers coming together to help promote, recruit, and be part of the White Dudes for Harris Zoom gathering. Over 200,000 people joined the gathering and raised over $4.5 million.

Many who organized, participated in, and attended this Zoom had never been part of an “event for white guys” before. The values were clear: The right wing claims to speak for white men, so we need to speak as white men for progressive values, and act to defeat Trump. While the election ended with a devastating defeat, the energy displayed in the short sprint of those final months is inspiring. It also helps lay the groundwork for the critical work ahead. Yes, the effort fell short, but it demonstrated a new capacity for white antiracist organizations that could, if mobilized, play a vital role in resisting the Trump administration today.

The Long History of White Antiracist Organizing

There are many similarities between the early days of white antiracist organizing and the work we are doing today.

In the early 2000s, I was part of a growing ecosystem and network of white antiracist organizers who believed we could do much better than just having a few hundred “exceptional” white people—basically one or two in multiracial nonprofits—and instead develop vision, culture, strategy, and leadership to organize white people in large numbers into efforts for collective liberation.

Back then, I was a leader with the Catalyst Project and the Heads Up Collective, and we knew we needed to add more people. In the late 1990s, the common antiracist sentiment was “only a small number of white people” would take this work on. There was often an analysis focused on “confronting white privilege” that led frequently to a culture of guilt, shame, self-doubt, and animosity toward other white people, which created a high bar of entry. White people competed to prove themselves as exceptional, which often meant distancing and differentiating themselves from “other white people.”

As white antiracist organizers, we recognized that these dynamics were understandable. White supremacy is a devastating death culture, and white people experiencing guilt and shame is often part of the process of learning a more complete version of history and one’s place in it. At the same time, we wanted to move from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, however, we began to understand that new approaches were needed. With encouragement from mentors, advisors, and comrades of color, and a new generation of white antiracist organizers, we set out on this path.

We knew we needed a systemic class analysis of how ruling elites use divide-and-conquer strategy—cultivating (through law, policy, and culture) a sense of superiority among white people, what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wages of whiteness,” and then assigns blame to communities of color for the hardships, pain, anxiety, and depression of economic inequality that many white people experience. From there, we began developing an organizing strategy to bring in large numbers of white people from a place of mutual interest—what bell hooks called “collective liberation.”

The strategy, in short, is to invite white people into the shared struggle for healthcare, living wages, good housing, and good schools. To align their love for their families, their homes, fairness and dignity, with the long river of Black liberation struggle and multiracial working-class organizing for a better world.

There is far more leadership, insight, culture, strategy, and infrastructure now to build on going forward.

From there, we begin to move away from “calling out white people” to creating a warm, welcoming, invitational culture to help white people heal from the ways white supremacy and systems of oppression have negatively impacted them. This is, in short, a relational organizing approach that brings people into the work—and critically, helps develop a positive, healthy, liberatory culture.

We were also thinking deeply about how to develop white antiracist leadership and organizing skills, and how to help white antiracists understand themselves as part of a long line of white antiracists throughout history.

These leaders include Anne and Carl Braden, Zilphia and Myles Horton, Adrienne Rich, and Howard Zinn. We heard Anne Braden’s teaching that you “can’t organize people you hate” and Howard Zinn’s encouragement to believe in the power of “people’s movements.”

Moving Forward

There remains tremendous organizing work to be done in white communities for multiracial democracy and economic justice. The good news is that with groups like SURJ organizing large numbers of white people, the movement has grown tremendously. There is far more leadership, insight, culture, strategy, and infrastructure now to build on going forward. There is also a wide array of white antiracist efforts locally, in unions, religious and spiritual communities, schools, and beyond.

Of course, with Trump now president, these are heartbreaking times. Authoritarianism, and supremacy systems in general, seek to starve the imagination of liberatory efforts, so there is great need for nourishment in this work. A positive, liberatory organizing framework is key.

I want to see white men’s organizing flourish and become more and more effective for the world we want; for the communities we love; for our families; for our shared future and humanity; for Black feminist leaders like Barbara Smith, bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, and Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson who have long encouraged these efforts; and for my children. I believe in the liberatory potential and positive power of joining with broader forces—against the death culture of supremacy systems and for collective liberation.

Note:

1. NPQ typically uses a capital “W” to refer to White people to emphasize the ubiquity of Whiteness as a racial identity in US society. However, here we are using a lowercase “w” at author’s request.