It seems a large part of the “electability” argument is how will a candidate appeal to white men of the establishment. And yet this is the exact behavior/reality that progress towards equality should be erasing.
For example, my mom didn’t believe a woman would have been able to win the 2020 election, regardless of politics.
Oluo asks, what do marginalized people have that would make white men feel more included? Perhaps the subtext is that white men don’t want to feel included equally, they want to feel included /disproportionately./ White men will need to lose out on power they have historically enjoyed in order to distribute that power equally among all members of society. Will social equality involve boosting the disadvantaged, or redistributing the privilege pie?
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, as with the 2016 election, we were drowning in talk of how we were going to make working-and middle-class white men feel included in order to defeat conservative forces. But I must honestly ask: What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do not have control of our local governments, our national governments, our school boards, our universities, our police forces, our militaries, our workplaces. All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity—and our celebration of even symbolic steps toward them—is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of. If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem? In an increasingly diverse country, white men can only demand to be the exclusive focus of our political systems for so long. — Mediocre, pg 85