How White Guys Are Mobilizing Other White Guys To Elect Kamala Harris

If the idea of a bunch of liberal white guys talking about a “positive, multiracial, feminist democracy narrative” strikes you as unbearably cringey, white guys like Chris Crass would encourage you to consider the alternative.

As a “progressive white guy,” Crass often feels “really sad about what white guy political expression looks like” in the age of Donald Trump and the hard-core masculine right. “When you think of, like, white men taking political action, generally the idea of what that looks like is terrible — Charlottesville, MAGA, a Klan rally,” said Crass, a longtime organizer from Louisville, Kentucky.

But in late July, with Vice President Kamala Harris suddenly the de facto presidential nominee, Crass saw an opportunity to mobilize “progressive white men for multiracial feminist democracy” — in other words, organizing white men behind Harris and against Trump. Crass, 50, co-founded the group White Men Against MAGA within 24 hours of Harris replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Crass is quick to note the idea for White Men Against MAGA came from Win With Black Women, which held a Zoom call with 90,000 Black women and their allies on July 21, the day Harris launched her campaign. Crass wanted his own efforts on behalf of white men and Harris to be just as “positive” and “joyful,” with a “sense of possibility and hope” for what white guys can accomplish this election “instead of all these years under Trump being like, white men suck.”

For the second time in a decade, Democrats have picked a female nominee for president ― after Hillary Clinton in 2016 — choosing Harris, a boundary-breaking woman of color competing in a coin-toss election that will be decided, in part, by white guys