Do I Want to Be A Good White Man, Or An Organizer of White Men?

That was my frame my whole life before WMRJ. I was certain, in fact, that I was a good white man and thus had no work to do. Did I have work to do to meet the true definition of “good”? Absolutely.

But until WMRJ found me, I hadn’t examined my whiteness, or examined my “M” or my wealth because I assumed all those things were just a given. WMRJ asked me to redirect my gaze.

Away from those spaces where I showed up thinking I was one of the “good” ones, and start the work of owning my shit. And what I found was a lot of other white men were in the same boat. Organizing white men means, to me, finding white men who want a better world for them and theirs, know that it’s not happening, but don’t have any sense what to do about it.

Organizing white men isn’t about talking about it, it isn’t about intellectualizing our way out of my own way. It’s about coming together collectively in a brave space that allows me the opportunity to learn and grow in community, not relying on BIPOC to tell me I’m doing good or how to be better or essentially to shoulder the emotional burden of my baggage.

Organizing white men means unpacking those bags together and finding strength in what we find together and collectively to use that strength to impact our families, our community and our world, differently. It means, to me, to stop thinking I’m a good white man, and expecting others to tell me so when I show up in multi-gendered, multi-racial spaces. And instead to go get my people, other white men, and begin the slow, hard process of doing the best we can until we know better and then doing better.

But it means hard work in white male spaces as a prerequisite so that the collective power that shows up is showing up in heart strength and not ego driven asking for our cookies since we’ve been good white men.