How We Got Here, How We Get Out⁠↗

It is also one that we’ve asked enough these past few years to be able to parrot back a familiar litany of answers. We tell ourselves that it is because white America is racist and male America is sexist and rural voters are fearful and we actually don’t know anything about Latino voters because that’s a socially constructed category into which we’ve stuffed a whole bunch of different people of Iberian and African and Indigenous descent and also because there is so much disinformation and there is Fox News and Facebook and the Boomers are weird. We tell ourselves that if this particular candidate had run a more effective campaign or had policies that better align with the policies we personally like that it would have been different. We correctly identify that the Electoral College is a big dumb racist albatross. Some of those theories are overly simplistic, but many of them are extremely correct. All of them, however, are presented in a way that is a hair too cute and trite. In progressive circles, we know that the best right answer will be to say, once again, that the problem is white supremacy. And we won’t be wrong. My fear, though, is that after all the Very Correct Proclamations are laid down, that we’ll go back to the same tired well as to what to do about it. We’ve spent four years being mad that millions of white Americans are comfortable with racism and white supremacy and yet our only consistent, scalable idea has been to either yell at them or ignore them. Not surprisingly, the Great American Unfriending has not resulted in liberation.

Liberals (in particular white liberals) too often treat politics as an Embarrassment Cleanse, a means of connecting your Correct Beliefs to easily observable Correct Actions which in turn ensures continued acceptance into Correct Social Networks. We either yell at or cut off the limited number of Incorrect People in our lives so as to avoid the stain of second-hand embarrassment. Those people then, in turn, seek solace in news sources and social networks and eventually political saviors that allow them to process that rejection as merely the product of the other side’s intolerance, not as any cause for self-reflection.

We should not be surprised, then, when once again tens of millions of people, disproportionally white, made a damaging and insulting political choice because it offered them the path of least resistance. Their vote for Trump is merely a mirror of the hundreds of thousands of decisions that white people (including millions of Biden voting white people) make every day— decisions about their kids’ schools, about where they live, about where they work, about what they are or aren’t willing to give up for the common good.

You don’t get to just wish or hope or even vote your way into being a better country. You have to build it.

White people need to spend more time with other white people, especially those whose views we find abhorrent. We need to do so not in order to “find common ground” or to “come together in spite of our differences” but with the end goal of unlocking a version both of the other person and of ourselves beyond white supremacy.

The organizing we need to do can not merely be about changing how the Bad White People vote. What we all have in common is that, somewhere along the line, there is a tangible step towards equity that we personally are still too stubborn to take. White parents with Black Lives Matter signs in their yard still send their kids to school districts that structurally perpetuate every problem they purport to oppose. Young white Christians still flock towards churches whose Instagram aesthetics are edgy but whose theology is more Imperial than liberatory. Ideologically spotless urban white socialists and abolitionists still remain more interested in debating Gramsci with each other than actually organizing people outside their social circle. If any of us approach this from the stance of needing to fix other white people, we’re going to lose. If we approach it with the rigor of those turn-of-the-century Norwegians though— focusing on a long game of relationship-building and learning together and shared vulnerability as we help each other get over our personal humps— then we have a chance.

Believe it or not, the work of organizing isn’t the hard part. It’s deciding that you love and believe in people enough to want to organize them.