White Women Racialized & Mobilized
It's historic. And, if we don't reckon with empire, it won't matter.
This week there have been two different organizing events specifically for white women. On Tuesday, there was one organized by the folks at SURJ, which drew about four thousand people (watch the video here). On Thursday, there was another one, organized by some celebrities, that drew over a hundred thousand people and raised over a million dollars for the Kamala Harris campaign using the hashtag #AnswerTheCall2024 (watch the video here).
The discourse on social media about it looked a lot like this post with lots of this kind of “raise your glass” energy, which is the name of a song by pop singer Pink, who also joined the call, along with sports stars Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, the actor Connie Britton, and the influencer Glennon Doyle.
This has been mesmerizing to witness. The kind of affective work - attending to the emotions and feelings of organizing white people - that I’ve seen on these calls has been fascinating. On the SURJ call, there was a lot of encouragement and praise for doing the work of showing up, allaying fears for first time activists, eschewing feelings of guilt or shame, and invoking positive (white women) ancestral role models. With the celebrities on the second call, there was a bit more hand-wringing about past failures of white women, but lots of emphasis on hope and change. The rhetoric reminded me a lot of that around the Obama campaign.
The current effort to mobilize white women is a significant development because it represents a shift from the colorblind feminism deployed previously that tried to engage “all women.” This is big and makes it “feel different” this time, as April (@ReignofApril) pointed out yesterday:
She’s right, this feels different. It’s a smart move politically to intentionally target white women and try to galvanize them around a Democratic candidate who is a Black and South Asian woman.
One thing is clear: the push to get Joe Biden to step aside and put Kamala Harris forward happened because of the organizing efforts of pro-Palestinian activists who got voters to mark their ballots “uncommitted” in the primaries. Without the efforts of those activists, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about mobilizing white women.
So, the question becomes, will it be possible to force Harris to stop arming Israel so it can “finish the job faster” as Israel Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu said before the U.S. Congress on Wednesday this week. The lone profile in courage came from Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who was the only member of Congress to dissent in the chamber. She did so by holding up a sign that read “War Criminal” on one side, and “Guilty of Genocide,” on the other. This is the clarity of conviction that’s made the current moment of mobilizing white women possible.
The question now becomes if the white women newly mobilized can expand their vision of feminism to include those devastated by American empire? Will #AnswertheCall2024 merely be a way to reinforce U.S. empire and the multiple genocides our government is funding, not only in Gaza, but also in Sudan and Congo? This remains to be seen.
Where I come from we have an expression: “Dance with the one that brung ya.” It means if someone has invited you to something, you should show your appreciation by standing with them. The white women just getting in the fight should realize that the “one that brung ya” are all the pro-Palestinian activists. I believe Dr. Rupa Marya got this correct when she re-framed a post from the writer Sarah Schulman, saying:
This is where we are. I agree with Dr. Marya that Harris will lose (and should) if she can’t shift her position on Gaza. Right now is the time to demand this of her campaign.
This is a historic turn of events because this is the first time in my memory that white women are being explicitly racialized in order to mobilize them for racial justice. The only other example of mobilizing white women in this way is the (before my lifetime) Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching campaign, which began in 1930. But even this was very late in the efforts to stop the decades-long practice of lynching. The current turn toward mobilizing white women will only be a success if we can, collectively, expand our vision to one that’s international in scope and takes the destruction of lives in Palestine as seriously as those in Peoria.
We are in the late stages of the U.S. empire, and there are clear signs that it is crumbling faster each day. For a deeper dive on the signs of our crumbling empire, give a listen to this discussion between Sunny Singh and Sairo Rao.
The question I keep coming back to is what happens if Harris wins and the far-right doesn’t accept the results of that election? This doesn’t seem far-fetched given the current political climate, but it’s not discussed often because we are so enthralled by a once-every-four-years version of politics.
As activist Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) said, “You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Politics is every day."
