Page 26 - 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
On a national conference call at the end of April to
inaugurate a network of over 200 participants challenging white men into it, we’re launching the national Call to
racism and sexism, facilitator Josh Schott spoke from his Organize White Men against Patriarchy and White
own experience: “With white people, I feel myself setting Supremacy.
up ‘good white person/bad white person’ narratives as I
watch them enact their internalized white supremacy in the
littlest, most mundane ways –– and getting mad at them, While it’s open to anyone, regardless of race or gender, the
and wanting to distance myself from them.” vast majority of the participants on the inaugural call were
white men. An exception was featured speaker Erin
Josh is not a person of color recounting having to endure Heaney, the Exec- utive Director of SURJ, who addressed
daily aggressions: he’s a white man acknowledging his the importance of orga- nizing white men.
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, those of us on the
call acknowledged it as the
societal power structure
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 people and
leading them to take action to
challenge it. For those of us
who are white, presuming we
are “good