To Our Fellow White Progressives —
In the wake of the 2016 and 2018 elections, it is more important than ever that white leadership on the left and among progressives must go beyond just talking about racism, white privilege and white supremacy — and move to explicitly centering race in the day-to-day work of organizing in majority-white communities.
Too many of us who are white say the right words, but have failed to develop concrete organizing programs and practices that actually shift the people we are organizing around race at scale. We must incorporate fighting white supremacy — in white communities — into our political education work, the scripts we’re using on the doors, and in our media and messaging.
In the days leading up to the 2016 election, movement veteran Linda Burnham wrote,
“The power of the right cannot be undercut unless a large segment of its base is broken off. Obviously this is a long-term proposition, but whatever tactical moves we and others make in this electoral cycle, we need to retain this lesson into the indefinite future: white rage is lethal to democracy and progress and if we’re not organizing white folks around their suffering, we can be sure that someone else is” (emphasis added).
Two years later, her assessment is still timely. White communities have been organized by talking explicitly about race — but in the service of maintaining the power of the wealthiest people and corporations in our country. Meanwhile, most of the white left — and certainly the vast majority of the Democratic Party’s leadership at all levels — refuses to take on race. We need strategic, principled, transformative organizing interventions in white communities that are explicitly aligned with a pro-Black, pro-immigrant, pro-poor people agenda. For those of us who are white, our response to the unabashed, well-funded, and strategic organizing in our communities by the far-right cannot be to cede that territory and hope that leaders of color save the day.
The 2018 elections were full of impressive wins. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar become the first Muslim women elected to Congress. Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids become the first Native American women elected to Congress. The Yes on 3 campaign in Massachusetts protected the dignity of trans folks, and a giant win on Amendment 4 in Florida reinstated the voting rights of folks with felonies on their record.
Yet at the same time, many white voters cast ballots for overtly racist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant candidates and issue campaigns advancing a hateful and violent far-right agenda. Self-described Nazis, white supremacists, and those with strong ties to white nationalists ran and even won in districts all over the country. Steve King and Steve Scalise maintained their seats in Congress. Though Corey Stewart lost in Virginia, nearly 1.4 million folks in Virginia voted for an unapologetic white supremacist Senate candidate — with white women’s votes evenly split: 49% for Stewart and 49% for Tim Kaine. And while Kris Kobach lost his bid to become Governor of Kansas, nearly half a million people voted for the architect of Trump’s xenophobic immigration policies and voter suppression tactics. Andrew Gillum is in an unbelievably tight race even now with an unapologetically racist opponent who won 51% of white women and 69% of white men. And 75% of white women in Georgia voted for Stacey Abrams’ Confederate-supporting, Black voter-suppressing, immigrant-threatening opponent.
Donald Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon, but not enough emphasis has been put on the relationship between Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Trump’s presidency, and the current Republican coalition. Beginning in the 1960’s, the Southern Strategy was a set of political tactics employed by the Republican party to build a powerful base of white voters in the South — specifically by appealing to their racism. By and large, Trump has done away with dog whistles and has made the Southern Strategy a national one. In critical races across the country, we see more white people voting along lines of white racial solidarity than other identities like class or gender, despite the ways that a white nationalist agenda hurts so many white people too.
Changing this country’s elected leaders can have a dramatic impact on policies, practices, and rhetoric, but there is much evidence that racism is so deeply entrenched that it requires a profound transformation of self and society.
The electoral strategies employed by the right activate the deep beliefs white people have about race. A national poll run in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist violence in Charlottesville showed that nearly one-third of respondents strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that the country needs to “protect and preserve its White European heritage,” and nearly another third neither agreed nor disagreed with that statement. And when asked whether white people and/or racial minorities in the United States are “under attack,” 14% of all respondents both agreed that white people are under attack and disagreed with the statement that non-whites are under attack.
Sit with that for a minute.
And there are countless examples where efforts to organize white people has gone wrong. Saul Alinksy and large swaths of the labor movement did organize around white people’s material needs, but without talking about race. Meanwhile, much of the middle-class, white anti-racist work of recent decades has focused almost exclusively on individual study and has in turn fostered a call-out culture that hasn’t built power for shifting large numbers of white folks. And now the Democratic party and other mainstream white progressive organizations are talking about pumping millions of dollars into winning over Trump supporters to a centrist agenda.
That’s not what we’re proposing.
As movement leaders of color have been saying for decades, there is a dire need for those of us who are white to organize in majority-white communities that also suffer under racialized capitalism. We should look to poor people, disabled people, rural communities, and the South for lessons and leadership on building powerful coalitions across lines of difference. These communities have an often-erased courageous and brilliant history of resistance to a legacy of brutal exploitation and oppression. This means working cooperatively and collaboratively with other organizations to build a base and run issue campaigns that will improve the material and spiritual conditions of people’s lives and also build new electoral infrastructure, power, and skill. While there is growing discussion in progressive circles about the need to talk about both race and class with white voters, there are still very few organizations that have developed infrastructure and scripts to do this in majority-white communities. And as we work to organize our own, it is non-negotiable that white leadership on the left also invest in, support and follow the leadership of organizers of color in our movement, especially Black women and femmes in the South.
For many of us, this means dropping the assumption that some people are not capable of transformation. For those of us who are white, none of us came to this work without a journey. Elders — many of them people of color — invested in us, taught us, corrected us, and stuck with us as we learned and unlearned racism and white supremacy, and discovered the organizing skills needed to build power as part of a multiracial, people of color-led struggle. Our own lived experience should be enough to believe that it is possible for others to transform.
This work that we, as white people, are called to do in our own communities is hard work that requires a dedication and commitment to each other beyond any one electoral cycle. But until we are willing to do the hard and unglamorous work of deep, race-centered organizing alongside our fellow white people, we will be consigned to the same results of the past.
The work of organizing our own toward racial justice is foundational to any of us having a hope of changing the direction of our country — and for our own liberation. The Trump administration is coming for all of us, and until we address and center race in our organizing work, they will continue to have enough power to attack all of us who are not straight, white, able-bodied, wealthy, cisgender men. In these times, we draw strength and remain grounded by the words of Anne Braden:
“A new massive thrust towards racial justice will not alone solve all the problems that face us, but I am convinced that unless such a thrust develops — one that is global in its outlook — the other problems will not be solved. Because they are at the bottom of society, when people of color move, the foundation shifts…In a sense, the battle is and always has been a battle for the hearts and minds of white people in this country. The fight against racism is not something we’re called on to help people of color with. We need to become involved as if our lives depended on it because, in truth, they do.”
Onward.
