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Meghan Burke's avatar

Hey there, whiteness scholar here --first time commenting but have been reading and appreciating your work for several months now. (Traveled in via either Lyz or AHP; can't recall which!) I just want to say that I appreciate a lot of what you are writing about here:

-For about a decade I ran a DEI campus program for white students to build their confidence and competence in contributing positively to inclusion and social justice on campus, and while I left that work about 5 years ago, I'm both exhausted, and not surprised, by the degree to which that knee-jerk reaction against caucus work still hangs around.

-I also initially built my dissertation around the dance that so many of us white folks do around our racial identities (a la NOFX Don't Call Me White), though in the end the work, and my first book, focused more on, because it was situated in, the complex terrain of posturing for diversity but divesting from it in neighborhoods and schools that you also rightly name here.

-A lot of my academic work was pushing for the very kind of ordinary (and therefore not- self-congratulatory) work that I'm relieved to hear you noticed on that call --just figuring out what specific thing is helpful in one specific environment, and ...doing it! I left academia and focus now on industry workspaces in my writing and efforts, but the story everywhere is the same: find a thing that some sound indicator suggests may be helpful, do the thing, figure out if it was helpful.... it's not rocket science, but so often we trip over ourselves along the way. Whew!

To that last point, thank you for being someone who does these things, and seems to do them well, and for nurturing the hard and necessary conversations about whiteness that help us collectively get there. Cheers!

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Sue's avatar

Garrett, I had been hoping you'd weigh in on this, so thanks for that!

I, a cis female, had the call on while I was working, making dinner, etc. At first I was simply curious what on earth it would be about, but it pretty quickly became clear that it was primarily a telethon-style fundraiser. The first speaker was actually a Black man, Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party, and the final speaker was a female organizer, Erin Heaney, from Showing Up for Racial Justice, but in between, it was all White guys (beginning with the ur-Dude, Jeff Bridges). There was only one speaker that I thought was a total dud, and a handful that were genuinely great, including (of course!) Gov. Walz, Rep. Swalwell, Joseph Gordon Levitt (who wisely pivoted to strategy, with some talking points to drop if your fellow white dudes start going on about how Trump should be president because he's a successful businessman), Paul Scheer, and Wisconsin's own Ben Wikler.

And good on all the dudes (it *was* mostly dudes, based on the first names) who were donating to the Harris campaign! Toward the end of the stream, I made a donation, and indeed, a few minutes later, "Sue T. $25" came scrolling across the bottom. So when they say the call raised $4 million, I believe them.

One thing that came up was that only around 34% of White men voted for Biden in 2020 (I don't remember the exact figure, but it was something close to that), and if that number could go up by even a couple percentage points, it could greatly increase Harris's chance of winning. THAT'S why White Dudes for Harris is important. These guys are being told that they can make a real difference by voting and by talking to their fellow White dudes, and I hope they take that message to heart. Plus now there's a progressive alternative to the MAGA hat!

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