Page 22 - RACE HEALER Mag Volume 1 final draft

Call to Organize White Men against

Patriarchy and White Supremacy

By: Greg Horwitch

white people” is not only unfounded and self-congratulatory, it’s
harmful. As Angela Davis famously wrote, “In a racist society,
it’s not enough to be non-racist— you have to be anti-racist.”

Many of us who organized the call in April have been working
with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the national net-
work of individuals and organizations engaging white people
to undermine white supremacy and work toward racial justice.
In our work with SURJ and in coalition with organizations led
by people of color, we noticed that white men are largely ab-
sent both from feminist and anti-racist organizing. In an effort to
connect the white men who are doing this work and draw more
white men into it, we’re launching the national Call to Organize
White Men against Patriarchy and White Supremacy.

On a national conference call at the end of April to inaugurate a While it’s open to anyone, regardless of race or gender, the vast
network of over 200 participants challenging racism and sexism, majority of the participants on the inaugural call were white
facilitator Josh Schott spoke from his own experience: “With men. An exception was featured speaker Erin Heaney, the Exec-
white people, I feel myself setting up ‘good white person/bad utive Director of SURJ, who addressed the importance of orga-
white person’ narratives as I watch them enact their internalized nizing white men.
white supremacy in the littlest, most
mundane ways –– and getting mad
at them, and wanting to distance
myself from them.” Josh is not a
person of color recounting having
to endure daily aggressions: he’s a
white man acknowledging his own
denial. “Really I know that they’re
just showing me parts of myself I’d
rather not see.”
Rather than imagining racism as
simply individual prejudice, Josh
and others of us on the call acknowl-
edged it as the societal power struc-
ture favoring and maintaining the
authority and dominance of white
people. We all have internalized it,
and white people have a particular
role in educating other white peo-
ple and leading them to take action
to challenge it. For those of us who
are white, presuming we are “good