How ‘white dudes’ may reshape manhood this election

White men are coming out, but not in the way you might think.

Before more than 190,000 men joined a “White Dudes for Harris” call on July 29, the common wisdom parroted by the media is that most white men support extreme right causes and candidates. Not so fast.

“We’re taking white men back from the MAGA movement,” Ross Morales Rocketto, a cofounder of White Dudes for Harris, declared at the start of a three-hour telethon that raised more than $4 million for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. “By our silence, we white men have allowed white nationalists to speak for us.”

That white men organized — as white men — is among the many notable shifts in the 2024 presidential campaign since VP Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. For decades, white men’s activism and engagement in progressive causes has been consistently under the radar, obscured by extreme right wing men’s organizations, from the Proud Boys to the Aryan Brotherhood.

For decades, white men’s silence has perpetuated the belief that virtually all white men feel aggrieved, are anti feminist, JD Vance mini-mes. The truth, however, is that, for the last 50 years, there has been a growing cohort of men supporting women’s efforts to achieve gender equality — from supporting women’s reproductive rights to decrying domestic violence.

Critics have used the labels of a “pro-feminist” or “anti-sexist” men’s movement to try and marginalize us. Yet, the cultural shifts in recent decades — from men showing up in droves at the Women’s March in 2017, supporting the #MeToo movement and promoting engaged fathering — paint a different picture than the one the mainstream media has been relying on. It’s past time for them to dig a lot deeper, do the analysis and recognize the history.

Indeed, white men are part of a multiracial, multicultural movement redefining manhood and masculinities. An unintended consequence of White Dudes for Harris is that white men have been able to walk through a portal where we can be heard articulating a more egalitarian vision of manhood. White Dudes for Harris has inadvertently helped us put cracks in our glass ceiling.

Collectively, the two dozen speakers on the call — from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to actors Jeff Bridges and Bradley Whitford — made palpable the liberatory feelings men expressed being able to speak out as white men, and in so doing reimagine manhood. Progressive men have often felt unseen, not sure how to come out of a closet where they’ve felt isolated from other progressive activists. White Dudes helped to open the door.

While it’s unlikely that a majority of participants on the White Dudes call — including the 150,000 who signed on to volunteer for the Harris campaign — are aware of the history of the pro-feminist men’s movement, now that the door’s been opened, the prospects they will connect the dots to a range of pressing social issues are unlimited.

“We are organizing ourselves because we aren’t going to sit around and let the MAGA crowd bully other white guys into voting for a hateful and divisive ideology,” Morales Rocketto said.

California congressmember and U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff asked callers to think about how they might answer their children’s future question: “What did you do, Dad, to stop the MAGA movement?”

National Harris campaign co-chair, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, said it’s not true that white men lose when others get ahead. Landrieu believes that if white men in swing states “show up and vote for (Harris), “even one or two percentage points can make the difference.”

Whitford, who’s featured in “The Handmaid’s Tale” television series, wryly addressed what he described as the rainbow of diversity among the speakers and attendees: “So many shades of beige,” the actor remarked, smiling.

But it was Gov. Tim Walz who spoke out in language Trump and his supporters would have no trouble understanding. “A Black woman is gonna kick his ass,” the Minnesota governor spat out, in a rare display of more traditional manspeak. “And Trump’s gonna have to live with that fact for the rest of his life.”

Black women have always been the backbone of the Democrats’ electoral coalition, faithfully supporting white male candidates, election after election, White Dudes’ cofounder, Morales Rocketto, noted at the end of the White Dudes marathon event. “Now it’s time for white men to have a Black woman’s back.”

Rob Okun (rob@voicemalemagazine.org) syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male magazine, chronicling the anti-sexist men’s movement for more than 30 years and is editor of the anthology, Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.