The sinister side of ‘whites for Kamala’

The Saturday Night Live skits practically write themselves. Over the past week, white supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign have gathered on whites-only virtual calls , barely distinguishable from parody, to self-flagellate and virtue-signal en masse.

First, there was the “White Women for Kamala” Zoom call with more than 200,000 attendees, including celebrities such as Megan Rapinoe and Pink. This featured plenty of hilarious moments, such as when one speaker told attendees they will “want to speak to a manager” while doing racial justice work but warned them that none exists, or when one TikToker told hundreds of thousands of adult white women to “put their listening ears on” and shut up when a “BIPOC” person (read: minority) is speaking. The Zoom call's host summed up the event's mood when she said, “I feel like we all just went to collective therapy together.”

Then came the “White Dudes for Kamala” follow-up event , featuring figures such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and progressive activist David Hogg. This, too, had plenty of cringe-worthy highlights (lowlights?) such as reflections on their white privilege, observations about the “rainbow of beige” people on the call, and promises to be “educated” by “marginalized communities.”

So, on one hand, this new form of “woke” activism is genuinely hilarious. It offers enormous entertainment value if you can overcome the secondhand embarrassment. But there’s a sinister side to this new strain of Democratic white identity politics.

Democrats may not realize it, but with this kind of self-segregated, “whites-only” political activism, they are reinforcing racial identitarianism and the divides between racial groups in America, not breaking them down or promoting harmony and coexistence. There is no culture or experience that “white,” a vague and nebulous category, people have in common. But this kind of activism nonetheless reinforces the idea of white collective identity, an idea with a dangerous and toxic history in the United States.

It’s not a coincidence that the infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer praised the Harris campaign for its whites-only Zoom calls. If that’s not a sign that Democrats are astray, what is?

Secondly, this brand of activism perpetuates one of the most toxic ideas of modern progressivism: collective guilt, the idea that individuals bear responsibility for the actions of their broader demography.

This is epitomized by the materials circulated by the “White Dudes for Kamala” organizers. Their talking points included, “We need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the role we’ve played in our nation’s history — good and bad.”

Excuse me? Neither I nor any of the white men on that call played any role “in our nation’s history” beyond our lifetimes. We are in no way, shape, or form responsible for the actions and decisions made by people in the past who look like us.

To understand how absurd this is, imagine a white man today taking credit for the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein, because they check off the same box on the census. And an ideology or movement that actually suggests individuals bear collective blame or responsibility because of their skin pigment and chromosomes is not just a misguided one but a deeply evil one.

This is the logic of the tyrant, of the genocidaire. It’s the kind of thinking used to justify some of the greatest injustices in American history, such as when Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt imprisoned more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including many U.S. citizens, in “internment camps” for the “crime” of sharing heritage with people who were waging war against America.

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This act is now rightly viewed as one of the biggest civil rights violations in U.S. history, a deeply immoral act rooted in an evil premise: collective guilt. While the consequences and outcomes are nowhere near on the same scale, of course, the same evil basis underlies modern Democratic white identity politics.

So, yes, we can and should mock these cringe-worthy “whites for Kamala” displays. But we must not lose sight of the fact that at a deeper level, there’s nothing funny about them at all.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, YouTuber , and co-founder of BASEDPolitics .